Poet/Writer/Photographer/Ad Guy

Poetry Economics

2011-12-29T10:56:00.000-08:00

The economics of writing poetry are unfortunate. Most journals don’t pay poets for their poems. Most journals don’t make money. Most of the time all the poet gets is a free contributor’s copy. No complaints here. Though when I say most journals don’t pay what I mean they don’t pay money. Those journals, and there are many, pay with respect for the writer and the work. I’ve been thrilled to have my poems in many of them and even continue to support those journals with a subscription. But recently I’ve had a poem appear in an anthology, Wait a Minute, I Have to Take Off My Bra, that's taking advantage of the writer’s who made the book possible. I was happy to let them publish my poem, didn’t even occur to me that I should be paid. When I saw the book was being sold on Amazon I sent them an email asking when I could expect a contributor’s copy. Their reply, it would be months before they sent contributors' copies, and this was followed by an email saying that I could buy books at a discount. Hmmm, they have time to sell the book but don’t have time for the people who made the book possible. Sending contributor’s copies shouldn’t be a troubling chore when it’s the only form of payment. The book has been selling for months. If and when they send a contributor’s copy I’ll let you know. Let’s start a pool and see how long it takes. I’ll send the book to whoever gets closest.

Two poems in the fall issue of the Disquieting Muses Quarterly

2011-12-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

Two of my poems, "The Cenotaph" and "The New," are up at the Disquieting Muses Quarterly. Click here: www.dmqreview.com/11Fall/index2.html and it'll take you to the table of contents. From there simply click on my name. Hope you like the poems.

2011-10-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

"Poetry just like painting is something that you have to give your entire life to – and that includes all your life." Jim Harrison

Poetry Reading In San Diego

2011-10-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

Reading in San Diego this weekend, Sunday, Oct 9, 3pm.
Open Door Books, 4761 Class Street, San Diego.
Once again, I will try not to be boring.

Inteview with The Coachella Review

2011-09-28T09:11:00.001-07:00

Lori Davis interviewed me for The Coachella Reiview:

http://www.thecoachellareview.com/blog/?p=692

Prose Poem Workshop

2011-09-08T09:36:00.001-07:00

What happens when poets feel the need to rebel against the tyranny of the line break? They signup for my one day prose poem workshop at UCLA Extension. It’s on Saturday, October first. I’ll be fun. Hope to see you there.

Reading at the Skirball w/ UCLA Extension

2011-06-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Click here to see my reading at the Skirkball with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program Publication Party

The Aerodynamics on PoemFlow

2011-05-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

My poem "The Aerodynamics" is on PoemFlow today, (May 29th) poem: http://www.poemflow.com/1070

PoemFlow is really an app for your smartphone. But you can see it online.

Book review of Death Obscura by Victoria Chang

2011-03-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

Book review of Death Obscura
by Victoria Chang and posted at On The Seawall.
The url is http://www.ronslate.com/nineteen_poets_recommend_new_recent_titles

The second book I want to recommend is Death Obscura by Los Angeles-based poet Rick Bursky. At first glimpse, Bursky’s poems might seem deceptively simple, colloquial, even a bit light, to use a word that would be a slap to the face in any poetry workshop. But any careful reader who digs a little deeper and continues reading Bursky’s poems will discover that his poems are anything but light. Bursky’s poems use levity as a way to manage the darker aspects of life, of living. His poems are simultaneously funny and sad—if there was a way to bottle a stand-up comedian and a mortician, Bursky would be it. The poems in Death Obscura are death-obsessed, as in “Cardiology” where the poet begins with humor and ends much differently:

Seven years ago I bought a pair of crutches,
just in case. Each Sunday morning I practiced
walking with them, bent my left leg back
from the knee as if the ankle had been mangled
while stepping onto an escalator....
Twice each week the phone rings
at three in the morning. I never answer.
Someone is practicing sad news, I’m certain.
An oak will one day grow from my heart.
No amount of practice can prepare you
for the first push through dirt.

Bursky’s poems also evoke a sense of longing, whether romantic or not. The speakers in Death Obscura are always waiting for something to happen, longing for a different life without loneliness, as in “The Waiting”:
Standing in front of the toilet urinating, I lowered my head and my glasses fell into the yellowed water. So much for beauty. There are parts of ourselves we don’t want to touch, stories told in small gestures. Using the tips of two fingers I fished them out, let them soak in a sink of cold water. That was over a year ago. The past smells like a lost dog. The past is so damned tired, following us around. The past can be forgotten for a while, like you can forget you’re wearing glasses …

Bursky’s poems may have thematic preferences across Death Obscura, but he never dwells or lingers too long within his poems, especially within poems that focus on love and relationships. The reader only receives small scenes and we are left puzzled, in the same way the speaker is often left puzzled. Bursky captures the mysteriousness of love through these small glimpses, as in “Heroine in Repose”, here in its entirety:

I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.

Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
or writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs?

After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.

In the end, what I love about Rick Bursky’s poems is his ability to take life seriously, yet to poke fun at himself and his travails. So many poets focus solely on the dark (I am quite familiar with that terrain myself). And rarely do poets inject humor into their poems, a task that poets seem to know is fraught with danger and failure. Bursky uses humor successfully to counter the darkness in his poems, in the same way that comedians use humor to break discomfort. He is a master of this and poetry is fortunate to have him.

[Death Obscura by Rick Bursky. Published November 16, 2011. 88 pages, $14.95 paperback]

Death Obscura Review from Booklist

2011-02-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

Bursky’s unflinching honesty is certain to resonate with readers as he crystallizes the fleeting moments of life and then cuts to the quick with both precision of language and depth of thought in poems that are at once unsettling and comforting. The collection begins with snapshots of the everyday, then expands into a series of prose poems about death and the supernatural. A woman returns from the dead, another writes her own obituary, and the past smells like a wet dog. Bursky manages to be otherworldly without being inaccessible, somehow making strange phenomena feel all too familiar. The theme of death swirls throughout, yet the poems do not dwell on darkness. Rather, they are revelatory, pulling back the curtain to illuminate troubling and mysterious facets of life we usually choose to keep in the shadows. --Alizah Salario

See You At AWP

2011-01-30T18:46:00.001-08:00

If you're going to AWP drop by the Sarabande table (A29, A30) Thursday at 1 p.m., Ill be signing Death Obscura. See you there.

Interview

2011-01-21T08:15:00.001-08:00

I was interviewed by Beth Spencer of Bear Star Press. You can read it on her blog: www.theresabearthere.blogspot.com

The Inheritance

2010-12-18T18:34:00.000-08:00

The Inheritance

The only known use of a Komodo dragon in war by the United States was in the battle for Okinawa. A ten foot long, 300 pound lizard named Syracuse was trained by Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Barry Fiske. We don’t know how he trained the dragon. Though we do know Fiske’s grandfather was an itinerant preacher who became a lion tamer. We do know, between whip cracks the elder Fiske shouted bible quotes, know the chair other’s kept between themselves and lions is where elder Fiske sat and read sermons to lions. In the Fifth Marine Regiment’s morning report of May 6, 1945, “… Staff Sergeant Fiske led a dragon on a raid against an enemy position at 0200 hours …” Syracuse took the foot of a sleeping Japanese lieutenant before crawling back into the night, bringing the foot, still in its boot, to Fiske. A man in San Diego, California, went 263 hours without sleep, no hallucinations. Japanese soldiers couldn’t duplicate this feat, but fear of the dragon kept them from sleeping for days, deteriorating combat effectiveness. No way of knowing if the Japanese believed Syracuse was acting on orders. The prehistoric nature of fear is handed down the generations. We know Fiske inherited the bible, whip and chair which he carried on Okinawa as talismans. At night mortars exploded above the trees, galaxies growing and disappearing in the black sky. Fiske read the bible to Syracuse at the bottom of their foxhole. After the war, Fiske left the Marine Corps, moved to Los Angeles and became a plumber. In a postcard to one of his sons, he wrote, “a man can make a life with a bible, whip and chair.”

Dean Young

2010-12-11T08:07:00.001-08:00

Dean Young, quake-in-your-boots poet and wonderful, kind human, needs a new heart. Please consider donating if you can.

http://www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung

The Scarifice

2010-12-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

The Scarifice

It was one of those rare tap dancing accidents – I broke both feet while transitioning from a Cincinnati time step to a maxiford with toe. As I love the sound of metal on wood floating through a quiet theater, I was rehearsing in the early morning, dancing next to the curtain where the sound is richer, muffled by the thick cloth. My feet tangled. I fell like a clown wearing bulbous red shoes rolling out of a car in a circus tent. A janitor who was about to begin mopping the aisles called for an ambulance. The driver was an amateur medical historian who had just authored an article on bone density in tap dancers and took me to Doctor Timothy Charlton, one of the few orthopedic surgeons in Los Angeles who specialize in tap dancing injuries. Doctor Charlton shook his head over the x-rays. The calcaneus in each foot pushed into the talus with such force that the nerve endings had been unalterably reversed. He had seen this many times, but only as a result of a faulty double stomp buck time step. My only hope of ever again dancing was for both feet to be amputated and sewn on the opposite leg. Doctor Charlton drew a foot on the x-ray showing me what my right foot would look like on my left leg. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I think people are admiring my shoes when they look down for a touch too long while standing next to me in an elevator. Sometimes I dream of that morning. They wheel me into the operating room. Gene Kelly is there wearing green scrubs. A mask covers the bottom of his face but I recognize his eyes. As he picks up a scalpel he begins to tap his foot and is soon doing a paddle roll. The doctors and nurses join in.

The Week of Harsh Holidays

2010-11-29T06:46:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the Hawaii Pacific Review, Hawaii Pacific University, Vol. 14, 2000.)

The Week of Harsh Holidays

Sunday: The Weatherman’s Holiday

In classical times this was the day
men consummated a threat and the season
changed. Bitter men call this Revenge Day.
Greeting cards are expected.

Monday: The Day of The Atoned Rock

Candles burn. Prayers end
with a name. Young girls secretly
relish this day: the possibility of aftermath.

Tuesday: Adulteress’s Day

Who wears a blindfold?
Who’s ear is cut off? Anonymous gifts.

Wednesday: The Festival of Catastrophe

Windows are covered with red crepe paper.
Babies born this day are named after hurricanes.
Lavish parties and dances are held.
Only fast music is played. When this holiday falls
on an even date people buy blankets.

Thursday: The Assassin’s Carnival

Parties and dances are also held,
though the music is louder. Promises are made.
Gifts are exchanged. Imagination
is under siege. Doors must remain open after
dark, even if no one is home.

Friday: Electrician’s Birthday

Only two traditions are practiced.
From midnight to midnight sleeping
is forbidden. What people do to stay awake
is unique. Written confessions
are sealed and left with relatives.

Saturday: The Biographer’s Sabbath.

Nothing to do with memoirs or survivors.
Families eat breakfast together. By noon,
a sigh of pity. Men are given a chance
to change their names. The lambs
are slaughtered for dinner.

Reading at Beyond Baroque

2010-10-24T14:25:00.001-07:00

I’ll be reading from my new book, Death Obscura at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, on Nov 5th a Friday night, 7:30. I'm reading with two other wonderful poets, Diane Martin and Millicent Borges Accardi. I think they charge seven bucks to get in, but it's well worth the price . Hope to see you there.

Here's one of the poems I'll be reading

The Silences

for Deborah

She didn’t speak for twenty-four hours.

This was the first silence she insisted on.

Everything she needed to say was stored

in the cupboard with the thin-lipped

wine glasses that we never used.

Though I don’t remember if she did

actually need to say anything.

The second silence was mine,

not a word for twenty-four hours.

I should have mentioned it earlier, this was her idea.

I should also mention this wasn’t meant to suggest

that she was tired of my voice,

at least this was the last thing she said

before saying nothing. I tossed everything

I needed to say in the corner of the bedroom

with the dirty laundry. And like the dirty laundry

it was soon cleaned. The third silence,

this silence, we shared. Remember,

this was her idea, not mine.

Mine was to sing to each other during sex.

Didn’t even have to be the same song.

I was planning on Italian folk songs.

Early rock and roll would have been her choice,

something by her favorite, The Del-Vikings.

The first time I disrobed for her

she sang, “who am I, the voodoo man;
who am I, the voodoo man.” Thus my guess

on what she would have sung.

But she preferred silence.

The Glass Boat Poems

2010-08-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

(All four poems first appeared in Poem, Huntsville Literary Association, No. 86, 2001; and are also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Glass Boat (I)

Everyone told him he was crazy:

the boat’s own weight would shatter it in the harbor

or the first swell the size of a tall man

would break the bow as its face slid down the windward side.

If his glass boat survived long enough to catch

a large fish surely the thrashing strength of dying muscle

would smash the boat like a dinner plate flung into a fireplace.

That was thirty-one years ago.

Now he only fishes when the late afternoon sun

slides beneath the hull,

flooding the boat with a silver light.

On the voyage home he stares

through the glass bottom

at the darkening ocean,

the resting place of every drowned man.

The Glass Boat (II)

Standing on the deck, surrounded by dying fish and ocean,

he looks like a man walking on water.

Sunlight flattening across the bow confirms

it’s glass, not faith that he pilots to the harbor.

He once broke a leg; one foot on the deck,

the other on the dock as a swell lifted the boat.

Another fisherman set the injury in wooden planks

and newspapers wrapped with old netting.

For the next sixteen days he lived in a public house

above the fuel dock. His wife worked the boat.

The fish didn’t know the difference,

not even when she shoved her fingers in a mouth

to pull one from seaweed tangled on the propellers,

nor did the ocean looking through the glass bow

when she tied her long skirt around her waist

to keep fish guts from knotting the lace hem.

The Glass Boat (III )

The differences between the fog, an ocean

and a glass boat are indistinguishable.

A fisherman on an approaching boat could see

the weather and nothing else until he notices

the dark smudge in the gray. At first he believes

it’s the church at sea priests spoke of,

a soul’s life preserver rescuing it from the weight of flesh.

His belief is like candles stocked for stormy nights.

Coming closer, the glass boat becomes clear,

forcing the approaching boat to turn away.

The man in the glass boat just watches

steam from his coffee rise, pleased

by the way it becomes the weather.

The Glass Boat (IV)

The fisherman’s wife looks at the glass boat

from the dock and sees only the ocean’s

heave and sigh and calls it Grief.

The fisherman looks down at the glass deck

and sees only the vein-like currents and skeletons

knotted in sunken ships and calls it Faith.

Fish make names, too, names with long sounds,

familiar noises inside a shell or a hand

rubbing the three-day stubble on a tired face.

When fish look up at the glass boat they see heaven;

and hear its sound, net descending into ocean.

No seagulls follow it on the journey home,

just the foamy wake growing from the stern,

furrows of a freshly-plowed field.

Reading in Chinatown

2010-08-04T14:53:00.001-07:00

I’m doing a reading along with four other people at the Jancar Gallery in Chinatown on August 14^th, 6 pm. The address is 961 Chung King Road. The other readers are Mike Alber, Karani Leslie, Ben Loory and Rachel Kann. If you come I promise not to be boring.

Poetry Worshops

2010-06-12T20:51:00.001-07:00

As in most other workshops safety equipment is required; eye protection, asbestos gloves, hardhat, harder skin, and Xanax are just a few of the things that my syllabus suggests. The more serious you are about poetry the more important the suggestions. Poetry tourists* only need bring copies of their poem to hand out.

Everyone in a workshop falls into one of two categories: teacher or student. Teacher facilitates the conversation. Everyone else in the room is a student**. Though this title isn’t always appropriate. I’ve had accomplished poets in workshops. The conversation is the students’ poem. Again, the idea of appropriateness. What is a student poem? A poem that could improve through revision? What poem couldn’t?

In a workshop, the good poems hold their breath.
In a workshop, the weak poems have three eyes - one stares at its author, the second at the teacher, the third eye is always closed.

Are you writing to understand the world or yourself, I ask at the end of the workshop. A poetry workshop isn't therapy, I say at the beginning of the workshop. Before taking a poetry writing workshop a class in living a poetic life should be mandatory. No writing required, just reading, think and an appreciation for the world in every way. Whoever said "I want to live my life out loud" should write the syllabus.

Basically, my workshop runs like this. Student brings in a copy of a poem for everyone. Someone else reads the poem aloud. Have you ever heard your voice recorded? It always sounds different than coming from outside our head. Hearing your poems read by another person has the same effect. It sounds different. The group discusses the poem. The poet whose poem is being discussed is silent. When the poem is published and read by a stranger thousands of miles away the poet isn’t there to explain. We should hear what people think of our poems and how it affects them without our editorial. At the end of the conversation the poet is allowed to ask questions. But not many. I than offer some suggestions for revisions, and poets to read that I feel they might find inspiring.

In a workshop, most poems are narcissistic.

Most beginning poets write poems that contain too much information. So do experienced poets. Most beginning poets use too many words. Ditto for experienced poets.

Perhaps the most important thing a workshop offers is a reason to write a poem. That sentence might be better without the word perhaps. How long should a poet remain in workshops? Until they no longer need a reason to write a poem.

A sense of community. Poetic fellowship. No one should be alone in the world. At the end of a workshop semester the women in the group decided to meet on a regular basis to share poems and camaraderie. They excluded the men. Not fair.

Another workshop transformed into an informal group called “Purgamentum Auris,” Latin for rubber ear or so they tell me. The name is based on a poem I wrote***. I’m flattered.

Students have written poems in my workshops that I wish I wrote. I often learn from them. Their enthusiasm is contagious. There are people who have been in my workshops that I am grateful for their presence. I hope they know who they are. I don’t need to be in a workshop to keep me writing poems. But I do need poets in my life.

* A poetry tourist is someone with no real interest in improving their poems and will never write a poem after the workshop ends.
** I once had a student bring her therapist to class. She had trouble being in groups. The other students thought she was a friend auditing the class. Of course, I couldn’t resist calling on her.
*** Ex Cathedra

What no one knows about me
is that my left ear is made of rubber.
The original was lost in an accident
when I was nineteen. As Dr. Gorlick
sewed it to side of my head
he said it needed to be replaced
every eleven years to appear to age
along with my face. Vanity compels me
to replace it every thirteen.
A rubber ear isn’t as uncommon as you think.
One president and two movie stars had a rubber ear.
The actors appeared together in a movie
without knowing about the other’s prosthesis.
Each morning I apply a lotion to the ear
so the rubber doesn’t discolor. Cell by cell,
the body replaces itself every seven years.
It’s simple science. I laid on my side
as Dr. Gorlick sewed. A nurse held the ear in position.
Lidocaine and something I don’t remember
prevented me from feeling the blood
run down my neck and cheek.
But I could taste it and began to spit.
The nurse put gauze pads
between my lips and apologized.
Things like this happen all the time.
Someone bleeds, someone apologizes.

Reading Tonight

2010-06-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

I'm reading at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program 17th Annual Publication Party tonight, 7:00pm – 9:30pm (Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:30pm) It's at the Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 North Sepulveda Blvd., just off the 405 Freeway and Mulholland Drive.

Night

2010-05-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

Night

In 1889 it snowed twenty-three times in Cleveland, Ohio, and each time only at night. Yet newspaper articles from that year make no mention of this. One hundred years later, 1989, it snowed exactly twenty-three times in Cleveland, and again, only at night. Professor Beth Wingate, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote in a scientific paper, “the author unfortunately is unlikely to be alive in 2089, but if in that year it snows twenty-three times in Cleveland and only at night, this will be a phenomena not a coincidence.” Where science ends faith begins. This never changes, and is the reason most ghosts are seen in the dark.

The Democracy

2010-05-02T10:55:00.001-07:00

The Democracy

The election is finally here. Once and for all, it will be decided which pencils will be legal, the softer lead number four or the hard number two. The count stands at 763 for the soft and 879 for hard. If the number fours become illegal I’ll move to a place where the smudge of a word won’t make a man a criminal. I can’t understand why some prefer to write words barely dark enough to be read. This is the same way we decided the size of napkins in cafes, and learned to drink without spilling, not even a drop.

Gatherings

2010-04-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in Denver for AWP 2010. I thought it was spring but it's snowing outside. Something uncommon for a man from Los Angeles to see on an April morning. What do you call a gathering of poets? A stanza would be a good answer. I haven't written anything for Ironomgery for months. It's time to gather the words and see what they say. Soon.

The Man in the Vat of Honey

2010-02-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

(First appeared in Press, Issue 2, Fall 1996; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Man in the Vat of Honey

The nurse sat in the waiting room writing

to her sister. In a small and glorious handwriting

she wrote that she hadn’t yet found a husband

among the injured men; and she was disappointed,

a sailor she liked drowned when his ship broke apart

in heavy winds. His body was now held

in a tall vat of honey behind the clinic. This was the way

corpses were kept during monsoons when the ground

was too thick with water for burials. She imagined him

sticky-sweet and folded at the bottom of the vat

as he might have looked on the ocean floor before his body,

released of fear and breath, ascended. She once sat

with her ear against the vat, hoping to hear what the dead say

to themselves, waiting as she would wait for the ground to dry.

But the only sounds were from alley cats stretched

across the lid, their coarse tongues licking the dried honey.

Ordinary Melodrama

2010-01-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

Ordinary Melodrama

The woman squeezing cantaloupes
with her fingertips is searching
for the beginning of her bloodstream.
Her days pivot around single incidents.
Egg falls from a fork and leaves
a yellow stain that resembles
The Shroud of Turin. About that
she is certain, her father took her
to see it when she was young.
She buys a clock for the bedroom.
The dog is put to sleep.
She wraps his body in a sheet.
This is what she does with the past.
The woman’s husband is a surgeon,
deaf in the left ear. Occasionally,
he opens the coliseum of her
chest to inspect the heart
for the pain inside the pain.

Leaving

2009-12-24T16:37:00.000-08:00

Someone important stood on a stage at a writers' conference and said people become writers in order to leave something behind. There was a time I believed that. Now I'm more of the mind that people become writers to have somewhere to go.

You leave a word on a page. You leave an impression. You take your leave. But where do you take it?

There are always more reasons for leaving then staying. I’m about to leave a job I’ve had for thirteen years. No, this isn’t a journal entry. This isn’t important enough for that, at least not yet. Everyone eventually leaves. I want to say it’s easy. It’s not. It’s almost winter. I drove home in a U-Haul van with eleven boxes in the back. I left my office empty. I left my parking spot empty. When I stepped out of the elevator that, too, was empty.

The history of leaving is synonymous with the history of premonition. It basically works like this, you believe something is going to happen and it makes you want to stay, or it makes you want to leave. Somewhere in the bible doesn’t it say gather your past and go forth? It should. We spend more time thinking of the past than the future. Most poems are written in the past tense.

You leave evidence. You leave well enough alone. You leave a trail. But where did you go?

I attempted to find evidence proving that travel was invented to accommodate leaving more than going. I found arguments for both points of view. That does little for my thesis. But leaving requires honesty. Going, on the other hand, requires hope.

When smoke leaves fire, which one is more sad, the smoke or the fire? The same question applies to a poem and a poet. Leaving can turn any day into a grave. Everything I learned about leaving I learned from women. One woman told me it take courage to leave. Another said it takes courage to stay.

This is how you write a poem, by leaving things behind. A novel is different. You write that by putting things together. You can’t leave your memories, probably why poetry is more about leaving. The poetic act of creation is an attempt to undo something. When that’s not possible, we leave.

Reading at Bergamot Station

2009-12-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a poetry reading with Richard Garcia and Katherine Williams at the Frank Pictures Gallery in Bergmot Station on Thursday, Dec 17th, 7:45. I'll hope you'll drop in. I promise not to be boring.

Dedication

2009-11-25T08:27:00.002-08:00

Dedication

My father was dedicated to his work.

No one painted more perfect dots

on dice or better understood their language.

One black dot is the doorknob death uses to enter.

Two are a man’s fists behind his back.

Three, a man and woman with a child.

Four explains a tragedy. Five is a parade of

desperate women in snow. Six, an orchestra of ants

performing the symphony of human emotion.

All of this on a single die? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “the world is a small place.”

First appeared in The Black Warrior Review, University of Alabama, Vol. 25 No. 2, Spring/Summer 1999; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.

Inspiration

2009-10-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

Inspiration is for amateurs*. You make a decision to be a poet, writer, artist, what-not, and then you do the work.

I was in the checkout line at the supermarket**. The checkout girl told me she wrote a short story. I offered encouragement and suggested she write more. “No, no,” she was adamant, “I’m not like you and never feel inspired.” Inspiration has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps I’m the odd man out. Perhaps I’m the only poet who isn’t inspired. I love reading poems and scribbling them in notebooks. Love thinking long and hard about poetic possibilities. Love testing the limits of language. And I would love for an inspiring moment to move my pen. But it doesn’t. Do great basketball players only launch themselves at the net, spring above others to dunk a basket because they’re inspired? Poetry is work. Work you – hopefully – love. So you do it.

I have to back-peddle just a little.

When I first became a copywriter I read many books about writing, the best of them was The Writer’s Art by James J. Kilpatrick. Somewhere in the book he said that the best writers were poets; no one pays more attention to writing then a poet. To me, back then, poetry was rhyming thoughts about love and flowers. Nothing an ex-paratrooper sort of man would be interested in. Kilpatrick suggested that if you want to be a great writer you should take a poetry class, even if you never wrote a poem after the class, your prose would be better for it.

Then someone died. Someone always dies. A poet died and they read some of his poems on the radio. They didn’t rhyme. They said he was a poet! Something was wrong.

I was wrong. Instead of what I was expecting, the poems struck me as beautifully written***, powerful short stories. I immediately flashed back to the Kilpatrick book, the best writers were poets. Right then and there# I decided I would take, suffer, a poetry class to make me a better advertising writer##. The following day I drove to Westwood and enrolled in a poetry class at UCLA Extension.

Austin Strauss was the instructor. Every Thursday night we met in the basement of a church on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The first night Strauss read us The Death of Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell and Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane by Etheridge Knight. The world stopped. I swear it did.

I had found something to devote my life to. Or it might be more accurate to say something to devote my life to found me. Of course, it sounds corny. But it’s true.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that inspiration found me that night.

There are forces at work in the world that cannot be explained. Science and religion argue about some of them. Poetry tends to steer clear of this argument.

Though my original point was that I don’t believe in inspiration I suspect the previous does suggest that on that night in a church basement in Beverly Hills I was inspired.

An artist must live an inspired life.

Opening yours eyes in the morning, that’s inspiring.

Live fully engaged with the world. "A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. " Wallace Stevens said that.

*Not that I’m suggesting that there really is anything like a “professional” poet. Most poets make living as teachers. Yes, I know Billy Collins probably make a lot of money from his books. And while I’m on the subject, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin and a few others do so. Though all of them, with the exception of Merwin where college professors.** I lived just down the street for a dozen years, had been in there probably three times before and knew many of the employees. If I remember correctly, I went to dinner with this woman previous to this conversation.

*** Though back then I would probably have not used the word “beautiful” to describe writing.

# I remember exactly where I was when I made the decision, I was in my car driving north on Laurel Canyon Blvd in Studio City, California, on my way home from work. I was listening to NPR as I always did, and still do.

## By the way, I am a better, in fact, great ad writer for it.

Death Obscura, a new book.

2009-10-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that Sarabande Books is publishing, Death Obscura, my second full-length collection of poems in the fall of 2010.

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

2009-09-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

(First appeared Fine Madness, Issue 26, 2001, pg 34. And is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

My mother washed dishes in the bathtub

then bathed me and my brother,

set us on the sofa to watch television.

Black and white washed over us.

At the end of each show Mother sat with us

pointing out good people always win in the end.

By the time I was eight I could hear the difference

between a cleaver chopping a flank of beef, leg of lamb

or the thin ear of a pig. You have to be

a butcher’s son to know why this is important.

My father worked for the butcher,

hanging pigs in the window.

Steel hooks through their cut throats.

Mouths open as if they had one more thing to say.

The headless chickens in the cold

box were always gone by noon, an hour earlier

Father wrapped two chickens in wax paper and newspaper,

put them aside until Mother brought his coffee.

My mother shouted

don’t track blood through the kitchen,

when she heard us come up the stairs.

Outside, shadows quietly battled

for control of the streets

-- a sound often mistaken for wind

dragging newspaper along the sidewalk,

a sound we wouldn’t identify for years.

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

2009-09-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

(First appeared in American Poetry Review, Vol. 33/No. 1, Jan/Feb 2004 pg 31; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

For two dollars you could run

your hands through her hair.

That’s what the cardboard sign

between her hands said.

A hat at her feet collected the money.

Wind pushing against her hair forced it to sway.

I dropped my two dollars in and grabbed

the hair at the back of her neck.

I closed my eyes; she closed hers.

(I don’t recall whose eyes closed first.)

It was the middle of the afternoon.

Perspiration dampened her hair.

I could feel people looking at me.

For years I told people I only did it

so she didn’t feel like she was taking charity.

That’s not exactly true,

for years I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I ran my hand to the top of her head,

turned and left before she opened her eyes.

There’s no telling what a man is willing to pay for.

Macrocephalus

2009-08-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

(From The Soup of Something Missing.)

Macrocephalus

After my dog was killed by a car

my parents gave me a baby sperm whale.

In a small wooden boat,

father on one oar, mother on the other,

we rowed past the swells.

The only sound was the oars’ monotonous

work followed by the sigh

of the ocean pushed behind.

When it passed beneath

mother shouted “there, there”

and pointed at the large dark shape.

Father took photos with an old Instamatic.

On the way back to shore,

the only thing spoken

was by mother who asked

if I named it and I had.

Hell's Hell

2009-08-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

(First appeared in Doubletake Magazine, Issue 8, Spring 1997, pg. 56; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

Hell's Hell

A waitress clears away the midday plates.
The skinny cook sweats and scrapes grease off the grill,
stopping only for a drink of cold water.
The bottom corner of the restaurant’s window is broken.
The owner’s been meaning to replace the cardboard patch
with new glass since it broke last year.
The three remaining customers ask for more beer.
They’re talking about robbing the beauty supply store, or the bank

next to it, or the bridal salon, pharmacy or bakery.
Together they have enough money
to buy a gun and some bullets.
This isn’t the first afternoon they made such plans.
Back in December they had the same
conversation as they wiped their bowls
of potato soup with chunks of bread.
But today, again, nothing happens.

Wind pushes against the cardboard patch.
It swings as if on a hinge.
A passing woman leans against the window,
curves a hand at the side of her face to block the sun
and looks inside. She sees the waitress, three customers,
but not the cook who went out back to relieve himself.
The waitress briefly stares at the woman's black silhouette.
Only a moment in hell's hell could be like this.

Titles

2009-08-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

Poems without titles are like anonymous people. Example, there’s a tall man with long, gray hair standing at the checkout register in the supermarket. You say to yourself, “there’s a tall man with long gray hair standing in line at the checkout register in the supermarket.” Not much there. But if the person has a name, title, everything changes. The example continues, you see the same man but in this version you know his name. You say to yourself. “there’s George Washington standing at the checkout register in the supermarket.” A million ideas are swirling around in your head. Knowing person’s title changes everything. Poems should have titles. “Untitled” is not a title.

Titles in a poem can also function like background music in a movie, atmosphere and tone. The article The adds nobility to a title, and if not nobility then a certain amount of importance.

Titles are a struggle, at least for me. Sometimes I go to a list of interesting words and read the definitions searching for one that might work as a title. The word should aptly describe the emotional, not literal, content of the poem.

René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist often employed and interesting titling strategy for his paintings. He would invite friends for dinner. After eating and a couple of bottles of wine he would invite suggestions for names for a newly completed painting. “The Empire of Lights.” “Threatening Weather.” “The Discover of Fire.” “The Voice of Space.” His titles are poems. I’ve used one as starting point for a poem* and titled it after the painting.

I’m one of the few poets who doesn’t read much Wallace Stevens. This is my diplomatic way of saying I’m not big on his poems. Perhaps I should read him again. I’m getting off the subject. Titles. Stevens was another one great with titles. “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

Haikus are titles. On my to-do list is write a poem using an ancient haiku as the title. And a poem that is shorter than its title? Why not.

The title of this book says much about my philosophy on titles. Ironmongery.
Titles are poems.

* The Magician's Accomplice

after Magritte

A copper tube hangs from nothing
and hides everything above the shoulders.
Chicken wire surrounds her pale naked body.
Six feet across the stage
her blond hair rises from another tube.
The brown curtain is amazed.
Only the polished wood floor saw
the way her lipstick smudged the cuff of his shirt
as he pressed the soft gag against her mouth,
the way the velvet ropes held her,
the way stage lights smiled
on the curve of the blade.
Mountains sit in the audience
wearing hats made of clouds.

The magician bows.
The accomplice drags the body
through the alley, all the while dreaming
of pulling riddles out of eyes.
The magician dreams of being cut in half
or flying from a black hat past
the ropes that raise mirrors over the city.
The accomplice wants to learn
the magical qualities of murder,
how anyone with a knife in hand
can be a temporary god.

The Argonaut Years

2009-07-28T16:04:00.001-07:00

The Argonaut Years

I

She dreamed she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
As she told me the dream
I finished brushing my teeth, spit the last
of the toothpaste and water into the sink.
I was an argonaut in her life, but didn’t mind,
love makes explorers of us all.
The neighbor’s cat left gifts at her door.
On the sidewalk, a broken piano
abandoned three days. A man
walking by stopped to play.
When does the decay set in?

II

This is when the decay sets in.
I wiped the toothpaste from my face
and kissed her but she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
I held a towel to my bloody face,
wrapped the lips in napkins.
It will be years before she forgives me,
years more before I learn what for.
She returned to bed, sat upright,
her knees pulled to her chest.
Her hands, she waited
until I was gone before washing.

Clowns

2009-07-19T15:07:00.001-07:00

Great clowns move seamlessly between sadness and humor and understand the influence they exert on each other. A clown is grotesque, colorful, outlandish. Isn’t a poem? Though few people have ever hired a poet to read at a birthday party. In medieval Europe clowns could say things poets would be executed for. They probably still could.

I was in a bank in Hollywood, California. Standing in line next to me, a man with a white painted face, red rubber ball on his nose and shoes that extended six inches past the toes and curved up. Other than that the rest of his clothes were typical ¬¬- khaki pants and white collarless shirt. In most other cities the police would have been called. I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to write a poem about this on at three occasions. I wonder if a clown, who after reading one of my poems, ever attempted to perform in the smaller ring at a three ring circus while a man poked at a lion with a chair in the largest ring and chimpanzee juggled in the other . Clowns seems to exercise better sense than poets. And unlike poets, most clowns have little to say. Body language, expressions, and props carry the performance. The narrative is based in image. Often there’s music like in a poem, music does more than contribute noise.

A poet is like a clown except not nearly as brave.

“Writers are a little below clowns and little above trained seals,” John Steinbeck.

The white-faced clown is often the serious member of the troop. A sonnet would be this clown. A traditional sonnet is in iambic pentameter as a traditional white-faced clown has red ears. The similarities between clowns and poems are numerous. Prose poems would be auguste type clowns, he is the fool and lower, much lower, down the clown social scale than white-face. As there are forms of poems there are other forms of clowns.

I considered compiling a list of poems about clowns but what would be the point? Though I did compile a list of poets who at one time or another performed as clowns, make-up and all. The length of the list did not surprise me. Subsequently, each wrote to me asking not to be included on this list. This also did not surprise me.

The oldest clown registry in the world is the Egg Register in England; hundreds of years older than the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland. Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia. Fear of poetry is more prevalent though without a name. I plan to create one soon.

There is much to be said for location. One of my favorite places to write is at the kitchen table at night. Something should be said about dress. What if put on baggy pants held up by suspenders and painted my face? What if I dressed like that while I wrote?

The man holding defibulator paddles hunched over the heart attack victim has bright orange hair, a bold stripped shirt and sad black lips painted on the bottom of his face. Saturday night, two clowns sit in a movie theater holding hands. In the jury box, three people in white-face with red ears and rubber noses. Without saying a word, image changes narrative.

The expression “clowning around” deserves more respect.

“A clown is like an aspirin, only he works twice as fast,” Groucho Marx. A poem is like an anti-depressant except it has more side-effects. A poem is liquor except the hangover lasts longer.
A man wearing a white shirt with a large frilly red color stands at the back of a bus slowly making its way through the early evening traffic in Brooklyn. He juggles bowling ball pins. Everyone on the bus watches. Three rows up from him a woman is writing a poem in a notebook. Just a guess, she could be writing a story or the explanation as to why she’s leaving her boyfriend. I am convinced she was writing a poem. The way her face lifted from the notebook and momentarily started at the passing streets, a poet looking for an image. I missed my stop, was busy watching her write.

Desperate Men

2009-07-19T07:11:00.001-07:00

(First appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 47, Autumn/Winter 1998-99, pg. 4; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

Desperate Men

The strangers worked nineteen hours building a chimney on the roof, pausing only to wave at a curious neighbor or eat a sandwich lunch. It didn’t matter that the house already had a chimney, they built another beside it. No explanation was offered. All the while, the occupants of the house were held at gun-point at the kitchen table. Once the chimney was completed, the strangers tied up their victims and fled. Police found no clues and could only say it was the work of professionals. It was suspected this was the same gang that held a rural family captive for eleven days while they added a second-story extension to their house.

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

2009-07-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

(Appeared in the American Poetry Review Vol. 33/No. 1, Jan/Feb 2004 pg 31; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

For two dollars you could run
your hands through her hair.
That’s what the cardboard sign
between her hands said.
A hat at her feet collected the money.
Wind pushing against her hair forced it to sway.
I dropped my two dollars in and grabbed
the hair at the back of her neck.
I closed my eyes; she closed hers.
(I don’t recall whose eyes closed first.)
It was the middle of the afternoon.
Perspiration dampened her hair.
I could feel people looking at me.
For years I told people I only did it
so she didn’t feel like she was taking charity.
That’s not exactly true,
for years I wouldn’t tell anyone.
I ran my hand to the top of her head,
turned and left before she opened her eyes.
There’s no telling what a man is willing to pay for.

The Toy Soldiers

2009-06-25T11:15:00.001-07:00

(from the Soup of Something Missing)

The Toy Soldiers

When he returned home he found
the toy soldiers had left,
one hundred plastic men
carrying their belongings
in sacks thrown over the shoulder
like a retreating army carries
the essentials of running away:
extra socks, blanket, stale bread,
wallets taken from the dead
to be returned as a consolation prize.
Hadn’t he nailed the windows shut?
Tied the mean dog to the door?
He began to notice other things were missing.
Laces from the black shoe under the chair,
its eyes empty, agape,
a dead man’s toothless mouth.
There was no conversation,
there was just the sound of a woman
brushing her long black hair,
a car coming to a stop,
crows flying off the telephone wires,
dust lifting from their wings.
Later, he’ll tell a friend that’s what it felt like,
dust lifting from the wings.
This was how he invented forgetting.

Heroine In Repose

2009-06-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

(First published in the New Ohio Review, University of Ohio)

Heroine in Repose

I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.

Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs?

After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.

The Techniques of Immortality

2009-06-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

What’s the life expectancy of a poem? Twenty-seven minutes. Yes, the life expectancy of a poem is only twenty-seven minutes. Most poems, according to the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, are not written by poets. Lines of poetry are unknowingly scribbled by all sorts of people on all sorts of things, and immediately thrown away. Of course, poets would say that a poem is immortal. Twenty-seven minutes is an average*. Considering that this average takes into account Horace, Sappho and Shakespeare you could probably guess that millions of poems race from birth to trash in seconds. Most go to their fates never knowing they were poems. For the vast majority, that’s as should be. For the minority, sadness. Think of all the great lines of poetry you and I will never read! It’s upsetting to think that there are people who don’t know that they’ve created something beautiful.

Darker poems live longer. A suspicion on my part. Poems first composed in notebooks live longer still. Fact. Manual typewriters have the same effect. I hope their scarcity doesn’t bode badly for poetry. Wondering about the life expectancy of a poem while writing is similar to having sex and wondering about the life expectancy of the possible progeny. Since poems live longer than ideas it’s best to write without them.

So, exactly how many poems are you expected to write in a lifetime? How long will you live? Keep each pair of shoes you’ve ever worn and you’ll live forever. Each night before sleep, take five deep breaths, hold the last breath for seventeen seconds and you’ll live to 102**. On a small Greek island they believe the color blue is essential to longevity.

If someone neatly tears your poem from a magazine and carries it in their pocket for two days you’ll live an extra week. If someone memorizes your poem you gain an extra month. If the memorization is the result of a school assignment you gain nothing.

A few years ago an article in the New York Times discussed the life expectancy of various types of artists. It was a slow news day. Poets have the shortest life expectancy. No surprise. At least half a dozen people sent me the article.

* Remove all the poems in the Norton Anthology from the equation, what then would the average life expectancy be? I called the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, and left a message with a secretary. After not hearing back for three weeks I wrote to them, included an SASE, still no reply. Some of my poems are twenty-five years old. Though none of my good, or what I think of as good, have hit this ripe old age.
** You must start this by your twenty-ninth birthday for it to work.

Photography

2009-05-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

I’m still working hard at attempting to understand the differences between photography and poetry. After years on the subject, the one, and one of the few things, I’m convinced of is that there aren’t as many as you think. One is supposedly a visual art, the other a literary art; at least that’s what most people would say. But they would be wrong! You see a poem and you read a photograph.

My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I was taking photographs before I began writing poems, and not just to make money. I wandered through days and weeks with a camera to my eye through four years of the army, sometimes pretending that some of the photo I took were actually art. Back then I consciously thought of myself as a poet who didn’t write poems but instead photographed them. Eventually, I became a copywriter, and then a poet. Photography took up less and less time in my life*. There was a tipping point, after that I thought of myself as a photographer who didn’t take photographs, instead wrote out his photographs. Though my nostalgia for all things photographic infected my poetic life in an unexpected way. I wrote The Myth of Photography*, a book-length poem that re-examined – and at times, re-imagined – the history of photography; and let the result mingle with memoir.

Photography is a primitive form of time machine. Poetry is always in the present tense, though it is often written in the past tense. The emotional experience of reading a poem is immediate. Just because they are called still photographs doesn’t mean they can’t move.

People should pose for poems in the same way they pose for photographs. As of yet I haven’t hired a beautiful woman to sit naked in a large red chair in front of me so I could write a poem but I have every intention of doing so. A hand gun laying beside a folded newspaper, half-eaten apple and five bullets scattered about, morning light pouring in through the window – this will be the first in a series of still life poems I plan to write.

Imagine the entire world, each and every tree, person, building and cloud in one photograph. Now begin taking things out. Take out billions of things. Keep removing until you’re left with a woman standing under a streetlight at night. She’s smoking a cigarette. Her arms are folded just under her chest. Behind her is a 24 hour Laundromat. That’s a how a photography works, edit out everything except your subject. Outside of the view finder the rest of the world might exist but outside the photograph there’s nothing. Elliot Erwitt said “photography is simply about seeing.” See something interesting and press the shutter release button. Poetry works the same way. Imagine each and every word in the dictionary forming the uncountable amount of images and thoughts that make up the world** . Now start to remove things, remove words, and then remove more words. What you don’t say in poem is as vital as what you do, well, almost.

I find it comforting to discuss a poem as if I were discussing a photograph and vice versa.

*Today I again think of myself as a real photographer, shoot with a Canon 5D and print with an Epson 2880.
**Sections of the poem have been published in the Southern Review, Washington Square, Main Street Rag, Lake Effect and Agni (online).
*** The world available to poetry is much larger than that available to photography in that poets can write about the past in a way that photographers cannot photograph it.

Moon

2009-05-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

While the sun makes no sound, at night I hear the moon scrape against my window. There was a time, long before we were here, that Moon was much closer to earth. Everything was better because of that. Since then, Moon has moved to a position some 250,000 miles away. Though don’t underestimate its importance. We need each other, Moon and earth; Moon and I. Anything written in Moonlight is off to a richer start than what might be written under other circumstances. It is a ridiculous oversight on behalf of Whoever that the sun is vital to life on earth in a way that the Moon never was. Strangely, as I wrote that line I was overwhelmed with an uncomfortable sensation. I am a poet of Moon10 and feel that I have just betrayed a lover.

Let me start over.

Man has been attracted to Moon in a way we never have to the sun. Yes, the sun is farther but that’s not the only reason there is little discussion about visiting. The sun possesses little poetry. Moon is rich, its topography a poetic table of contents. Earth has the Pacific Ocean, Moon has the Ocean of Storms11. Earth has the South China Sea. Moon has the Sea That Has Become Known. What I might write on a bamboo raft adrift in the Sea of Crisis! The Sea of the Edge is a place no man has returned from! Though men have returned from the Sea of Tranquility. Sea of Clouds. The Foaming Sea. Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet of the Moon*. The night he was murdered I’m convinced he fell into a puddle of Moonlight. I’ll probably never wade though the Marsh of Epidemics but I will write as if I have. Make Moon a planet, that’s what I say! One night in North Carolina I threw a rock at Moon. I apologize. I was drunk. And I was young. I’ve seen Moon in a bright morning sky. You’ve never seen the sun in a dark night sky. Ian Randall Wilson** has complained about my use of Moon. In fairness to his concerns Moon as metaphor, simile, pawn of figuration or whatnot does border on sentimentality. This is a border I have hopefully not crossed.

* The Moon of the Difficult Work

The moon like a puddle of milk.
If you toss a cup of moon into the air
what will it come down as?
The moon like a pale breast.
The moon like a hole in the black sky.
The moon like paper discarded by a hole punch.
Like the back of my eye, the moon, held between dark fingers.
The moon like a stranger.
The moon like a friend.
The moon like something forgotten.
The moon, a welt in the sky.
The moon is swollen.
The moon sinks
The moon sings.
The moon is the sky’s graveyard.
If there were no moon, would the sky need a new name?
Would that name be moon?
The moon of seven days ago.
The moon in another man’s poem.
The moon where I hang my hat.
The moon, what I reach for after I spit
in my hands and begin the difficult work.

** Ocean of Storms

A shark’s tooth in a previous life,
I shivered in the mouth’s broad horizon.
Felt electric fear as I sliced flesh.
Warmth blossomed.
I could taste the depths.
If I could I’d dig a hole
in the water for a dry grave.

In the next life I want to be
a tooth in a shark’s mouth
hunting an ocean on the moon.
Wreckage like praise.
Sublime fable.
The difference between
immortality and grief is delicate.

Cars

2009-05-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

We parked on the side of Mulholland Drive, above the San Fernando Valley. Two in the morning. Only a couple of minutes into our commotion, the point you’re committed to the conclusion but clothes remain wrapped around legs and arms, not yet completely shed; a tapping on the window, a California Highway Patrolman and a flashlight. This is not about lust. Cars are the topic. So far, I’ve owned nine in my life. At one time or another, slept in three of them; also had sex in three. To me, a car is utilitarian, never saw them as status symbols. Most other people do. Currently, I drive a hybrid, my commute is fifty miles each day.

I’ve never written a poem about a car, though in one poem* a car co-stars. My favorite line that I’ve written that involves a car, “The bank robber fell asleep at the wheel of his getaway car.” The rest of the poem** has nothing to do with cars.

The first car was invented in Germany, 1886, by Karl Friedrich Benz. A four cycle internal combustion gasoline-powered engine drove a small chassis with three wheels. Top speed, 8 miles per hour. It’s much more difficult to establish the first car poem. And the first poem?

Was it Harold or Patrick who told me that a car is a monastery? Was it the front or rear tire that I urinated on in reply? Context is everything. There is a misunderstanding. Poetry in motion has nothing to do with poetry; nothing to do with cars, either. Many of the world’s most accomplished car designers are trained at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, by coincidence, the college I graduated. Large, glass-walled rooms, boys in wrinkled shirts sculpting quarter-scale cars from damp clay. Isn’t everything made this way, sculpted? Yes. If a car begins as damp clay, how does a poem begin?

Driving to work just as the sun was making its way over the Santa Monica Mountains, two lanes over, a silver Jaguar was sliding down the freeway just a tad faster than I was. Relative speed made it seem like it was doing ten miles per hour. A swatch of reflected sunlight licked the Jaguar from the front of the hood to the top of the windshield. The windows were tinted, the silhouette of a man with sunglasses was the only the thing visible inside. The dark brown hill lining the freeway was a blur. I’ve never seen a more beautiful car.

A car is not a poem, but a poem could be a car. I’ve driven poems, perhaps more accurate to say, poems have driven me. I’ve tried to write in a car but it never works for me. As soon as I start to scribble poetry in a car a tiredness overwhelms me. My eyelids seem to grow thicker. The other day I arrived to a meeting early, decided to kill twenty minutes sitting in my car. Happened to False Prophets by Stan Rice with me, read two poems, began to write. Within minutes I was asleep.

According to a 2006 story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a man was found dead sitting behind the wheel of a 1994 Honda Civic on Laurel Drive in Rocky River, Ohio. There was an open notebook in his lap. The police officer on the scene told a reporter it appeared that “the guy was writing a poem, imagine that, dropping dead in a car on a snowy Monday night.” I could imagine that.

* The Invious

An automobile washed up on shore.
Was found laying on the passenger side,
could only imagine the side mirror was crushed;
could only imagine the difficulty
someone would have had climbing out,
if they hadn’t exited prior to the moment
the surf tumbled it into position.
It was found at low tide.
Drying salt water
gave the blue sheet metal
a patchy white sheen.
Seaweed clung to the bumpers
and was caught
under a windshield wiper blade.
The headlights, and this is the strange part,
though faded, still glowed.
A gift from Neptune
or the result of an accident
-- we’ll never know.
There were no witnesses when it arrived.

We tried to imagine
what else might have washed up
but returned to the ocean before dawn.
This was the same beach
where last month a woman walked
out of the water after being missing for seven years.
Her torn white dress clung to her thighs.
She carried her blouse and two broken shoes
that she put on at the road just beyond the sand.
She waved off the two men who rushed to her.
There’s so much we don’t know about the ocean.

** The Short Season of Sleep

A zookeeper carried a bucket of raw meat
into the lion’s cage, then yawned, sat down
and began to doze. The lion was snoring,
its tail sweeping the ground in a dream.

The bank robber fell asleep at the wheel of his getaway car.
The money in the paper bag next to him closed its eyes.
Not even the dentist could resist, eventually resting
his head against the face of a slumbering patient, the small
drill left to twist harmlessly in the cavern of the mouth.

The sleepiness was contagious, drifting from one heavy eyelid to another.
The last thing anyone remembered were the voices of people
singing lullabies as they strolled arm-in-arm through the town.
Not wanting to wake his passengers, the deaf bus driver waved
and didn’t sound his horn as he drove past the choristers.

No one knows what music the bats made that night
as they rose from their cave into the quiet sky
and chased a somnambulist walking along the river.

This was how the short season of sleep came and we discovered
the only difference between sleep and death was the waking up.
The next day this was discussed by everyone except the schoolteacher,
who remained at the desk in front of the classroom, her head tucked
into the fold of an arm, her blond hair moving with the breeze.

The Seaport Diner, Port Jefferson Station

2009-04-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

(First appeared in Mudfish, a literary journal, though I don’t remember which issue; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Seaport Diner, Port Jefferson Station

My mother and a cousin decide to go to The Seaport Diner,
my father’s favorite, for a cup of coffee on New Year’s Eve.
Though he’s been dead for six years, they take him along.
The black marble box that holds his ashes is placed
in a shopping bag, then on their table next to a window.
On another night the waitress might have asked about the box.
But tonight the diner is crowded, she doesn’t notice
that two women asked for three cups of coffee.
There are many ways to suck the marrow out of time’s bones.
This is my mother’s. No one’s seen the inside of the box.
Though at times I’ve thought all of heaven was within.
By refusing to bury it my mother is unwittingly hiding
my father from the devil. At a small table in the center of the box,
my father sits. Ashes piled to his knees, he remembers
flames and fears he’s in hell. If he walked forever
he would discover the wall and on the other side of the wall
my mother’s hand holding the spoon she stirred coffee with.

The Original Purpose of the Box

2009-04-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

The Original Purpose of the Box

In The Museum of Antiquities,
a guard in a gray uniform stands against the wall.
Once, he heard a woman say “I don’t believe.”
Once, he saw a child grow frightened.
Once, the guard told a man with an old camera
on his shoulder that photographs weren’t allowed.
Invention is a series of tragedies.
The original purpose of the box
was to contain the emptiness.
Though scholars once thought
it was invented as a place to hide

a length of silk, dagger
or a crucifix from a borrowed god.
In the middle of the room
is where the first box sits.
Tragedy is a series of inventions.
Each wall, the nuance of a different disgrace.
The floor, camel tongues stitched together.
The ceiling changed with the weather.
At night the guard takes the box home.
As he rides the bus it sits on his lap
as if it held his lunch or a gift.

Ghosts

2009-04-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

“My father's ghost watches TV in the living room.” This was the first time a ghost appeared in one of my poems, was with this opening line of The Jesus in the Garden.*

Ghosts have been a literary device for thousands of years.** Poets have successfully called upon them time and time again. Shakespeare more successfully leaned on ghosts in his plays than in his poems. The urge to compile an anthology of ghost poems is overwhelming but I’ll leave that to you.

The word ghost, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, didn’t really work its way into the language until about 1590. Back then it meant something else. To ghost was to breathe one’s last, expire, die. Today’s use of the word came later.

Staying on topic, some important facts about ghosts. These are things you must consider to successfully write about them. A man must be dead fifteen years before he is eligible to be a ghost, eighteen are required for a woman. No explanation as to the difference.*** The biology of the dead have yet to be studied with the necessary rigor. Ghosts cannot talk. Ghosts simply watch. If you want someone to return as a ghost bury them with an umbrella. This increases the chances by thirty-two percent. Researchers working independently of each in three different countries came to this same conclusion. “Haunting” is a construct of the living and something never practiced by a ghost. That noise you heard the other night was mostly likely a burglar or a cat knocking something over.

Identity thief is rampant among ghosts. Nothing to do with monetary gain. Somewhere in the transition from living to dead to ghost a giant confusion takes place. The ghost of a thirty-seven year old taxi driver from Buffalo, New York, who was murdered could take on the history and consciousness of a twenty-two year old Japanese from Tokyo who died of cancer. Imagine the dismay of a young Japanese man when the ghost of the taxi driver recounts their moments of intimacy. It would be impossible to convince the taxi driver he isn’t the Japanese girl. Ghosts don’t do this on purpose. I was attempting humor when I called this identity thief. Things like this happen all the time. Consider the imagistic nature of poetry and this could be a problem in a narrative poem that insists on an authentic confessional point of view.

A noise in the hall woke me. This was many years ago. I lived alone in an apartment in North Hollywood, California. The sound resembled that of a stick hitting a wall, was coming from the hallway leading to the bedroom. Just as I lifted my head from the pillow Rocky ran in. My father’s Great Dane. Rocky was large, even for a Great Dane. When his tail hit the wall it always sound like someone was banging on the wall with a stick. Rocky died of a heart attack years earlier, around the time my father was first diagnosed with cancer. I was so happy to see him I began to cry. He squirmed in my arms and climbed on the bed as I hugged him. His wildly wagging tail swept things from the table beside the bed. A minute later he turned, ran down the hall and disappeared.

The next night. I don’t remember what woke me, but I lay in the dark with my eyes close. Someone sat beside me on the bed. I could feel that persons weight push the side of the bed lower. I didn’t move. I didn’t look. I didn’t have to. Intuitively I knew. My father. My father’s ghost was sitting on the side of the bed looking at me.

When my father died of cancer six years earlier I lived in a different apartment, but in the same building. Four years after he died I moved into a two bedroom. The night before this he sent Rocky to find me.

The part of this that confuses me is that this was about six years after his death. Since than I have come to learn a man must be dead fifteen years before he could become a ghost. There is still so much we don’t know about ghosts.

Now, tell me a ghost story.

*The Jesus in the Garden
My father's ghost watches TV in the living room.
My mother's in the bathroom, busy cutting her throat.
Supper will be late. In the garden, my brother practices
the violin next to a statue of Jesus. Concrete robe, arms
outstretched for stain. I imagine Jesus standing
for the sculptor. Arms heavy without wood
to lift them. Boredom closes my eyes. There's a crucifix
above my bedroom door. At night, the tiny Jesus
struggles nails from his hands and falls. He reads the bible
and complains. By morning he's back on the cross.
There's hammering in the basement. My grandfather
builds oak tables for his daughters, makes them round
as a heavy moon, too large to fit through the door;
then smoothes the wood with his palms,
rubs blood into its pores. My brother plays
a few notes of hysteria, the garden's favorite music.

** The International Poetry Registry and Administration, Geneva, Switzerland, indicates that the first poem with a ghost in it was written in 1343 B.C. Only two fragments of the poem remain, “return to where / and prayer” followed by what seems to be nine lines later “the ghost of that daughter/ loved, yes and”

***Domesticated animals, dogs and cats, have been proven to become ghosts, and there is no waiting period for them. There are documented cases of wild animals becoming ghosts.

Then What

2009-04-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

First published in the New Orleans Review, Loyola University, Vol. 33, Number 2, 2008, pg. 172

Then What
for M.

Four years after burying the cat she decided to dig its remians.
The gardening spade used to plant flowers along the porch,
she would dig with that. Surely the skeleton would tell her
something, but if it didn’t, then what? When she pushed
the spade into the ground the moon was low
over her shoulder, like her father. Below the roots
of grass the earth was soft. She dug with her hands.
Isn’t it enough to be curious? That would be the answer if questioned,
though she didn’t plan to share this with many.
And behind her on the clothesline, a blouse and the white underwear
she meant to retrieve earlier but was distracted by a phone call.
She remembered the grave deeper, but in minutes
touched something brittle and curved. The underwear billowed
in a breeze that grew into a gust and glowed over her and the grave.

Self-portraits

2009-04-05T15:38:00.001-07:00

In the last three weeks I’ve drawn nineteen self-portraits. Two resemble me; a third almost does. I prefer charcoal to pencil. In the mirror my left eyebrow is an upside down checkmark laying on its side. In a photograph it’s flat, as it turns with the side of my head it drops off like the shallow slope of ridge. A raised eyebrow indicates suspicion. The only possible explanation is that when I look at myself in a mirror I look at myself with suspicion. What would a self-portrait teach you about yourself?

Poems are self-portraits.

In Picasso’s 1907 he captured his nose, eyes and forehead.

The mirror sits on the table; a Stanford drawing pad, four charcoal pencils, razor for sharpening, kneaded eraser, and a steel ruler are also on the table. Other things on the table include a glass of chardonnay and an ashtray with a smoldering Santa Damiana cigar. My eyes vowels. My nose is a consonant.

There was a time I believed if I wrote a self-portrait, I mean a detailed life-like rendering in nouns and verbs, it would be a prose poem. I no longer believe that. Now I’m positive it would be a lyric poem broken in two stanzas of six lines and forty-one words each. A face is always formal. Self-portraits are always confessions.

Vincent Van Gogh did thirty-eight self-portraits. He hides his face in none of them. I’m using the word hides in the most literal sense. There are more important meanings and innuendos for “hides” and none would be incorrect.

I’m absolutely positive that Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a self-portrait.

Try describing yourself, your face, in twenty-nine words. Explain your hands without using an adjective.

When was the last time you read “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery?

Each word you write becomes your personal property. No one would deny that our possessions speak loudly about us. I sat in a chair and wrote eleven lines describing the bookcase on the other side of the room. Each book was looking out at me from its spine and doing the same.

When writing your self-portrait do not start with “I am.” Never use a roller ball pen to write a self-portrait. Never write a self-portrait in the afternoon. Rules are important as they are reliable frames.

The Son of Man was the title of Renee Magritte’s self-portrait. In the painting he wears a bowler and a suit and stands in front of a wall, the sea is behind the wall, and his face is behind a large green apple. Self-portraits are poems. The poet is not required to reveal himself in a poem.

Submitting poems to literary journals.

2009-03-30T00:04:00.001-07:00

Sooner or later, everyone writing poems sends them to a literary journal. Without fail, editors or readers at these journals stuff the vast majority of these poems into an SASE and return them to the poet with a cursory and, often abrupt, rejection. Long live poetry.

Today I received a rejection in the mail. At least, I think it was a rejection. The envelope was clearly the SASE I sent with my poems. The same rubber stamp was used to address both the recipient and return address. But there was nothing inside. The editor returned an empty envelope.

Perhaps this would be a good time to ask yourself why you write poems. Perhaps the empty envelope was a code. I wasn’t trained as a code breaker in the army but I’ve read enough spy novels to attempt deciphering the emptiness. And I think I’ve figured it out. It works something like this. If the SASE contains an actual rejection note, the message is clear. He doesn’t want the poems. If the only thing in the envelope is a short length of green yarn the editor is undecided and is asking for an additional eight months to make a decision. If the yarn is blue you’re expected to send five more poems. Opening an envelope only to discover nothing inside is code for “I love your poems and will publish all that you sent.” I’ve gotten empty envelopes from literary journals four other times over the years. With these others it turned out not to be code for “I love your poems and will publish all that you sent.” This time I’m being optimistic.

Consider Van Gogh’s sales record. If he was a poet he would have published only two poems. Do you feel better?

Don’t take this as complaining. As far as being published goes I haven’t been as lucky as some but have been luckier than many. The word luck causally isn’t being used casually.

I sent a manuscript to one of the better-known presses. Five weeks later. “… finances prohibit us from publishing anything else for the rest of the year … send it back next year we’ll read it with an eye on publishing it …” I set my computer to remind me to send it back to them exactly one year to the day. And exactly one year to the day I dropped it in the mail. “Your voice no longer fits our editorial vision.” It took about a month to get that reply.

Before any of my poems were published I was happy simply writing and sharing them with the poet community I surrounded myself with. I thought it would be nice to be published but that wasn’t a deal breaker.

I stuffed five poems in an envelope with an SASE and cover letter and sent them off to a journal somewhere in the middle of the country. One week later I put the exact same poems along with the exact same cover letter in another envelope to the exact same journal. This gives me meaning to the term simultaneous submission. I printed out two copies of the cover letter, one remained on my desk. I made about a dozen other submission the day I sent to the journal that would soon hear from me again. Making it somewhat understandable how I might have forget that I sent to them when a cover letter remained on my desk. Five weeks later I got a reply. A standard, impersonal-good-luck-in-your-future-endeavors. No comments about the duplicate submission. A week later. The SASE from the second submission and an enclosed letter, “thank you for thinking of us … we would like to publish three of your poems.”

Has there ever been a group of people anxious to work for free like today’s poets?

Inside the SASE was a small torn piece of paper, roughly two inches by one, seemed to be the top left from a larger piece. The name and address of the journal was faintly rubberstamped there. Hmmm. I wrote and asked if the rest of the page was mistakenly torn away. Of course, I sent an SASE with my question. The reply was quick. Inside the standard number ten envelope was another small, very small, torn piece of paper with a scribble of an answer. No, what I originally reviewed was not a mistake. It was his way of saying he “didn’t want the poems.” I sent him 500 sheets of high-quality paper, twenty-five pounds, ninety-four brightness, with a note saying that I understood the economics of publishing a literary journal and the paper was a donation.

The list of journals that treat poets with respect and I am grateful to for publishing me is much too long to include. That so many poets run the gauntlet and continue to submit to is testament to our need for attention or our desire to share. Either way, I’m happy you send them out. I subscribe to about a dozen journals on a regular basis and often try others on a rotational basis.

In Fact by Yannis Ritsos

2009-03-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

I sat with my mom (who reads Greek) and a Greek/English dictionary and we did this translation, another poem from Muted Poems.

In Fact

Did you hear the bird
at that height?
It was him.

Speech by Yannis Ritsos

2009-03-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

This is another Yannis Ritsos poem from his book Muted Poems. Translated with the help of an aunt who reads Greek.

Speech

No excuses, he said, no regrets, next to the washroom
you hear her washing herself, the thin old woman.
She placed her three rings on the still damp glass shelf
and her false teeth on the washbowl lid. Outside the sun
is humming between the trees and above three birds are shouting,
they can’t see the three drowned in the well below
– the same three whose swollen stomachs our two fingers touched.

Small Promise by Yannis Ritsos

2009-03-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

I've begun translating some Yannis Ritsos poems from his book Muted Poems. I'm doing this with the help of an aunt and my mom who both read Greek. Ritsos was, is, a truly great poet. Happens to be my favorite.

Small Promise

Trees, mountains, the street sign on the yellow pole,
the green in the fog was the hills below. You looked,
didn’t see. That hidden absence that hid the view
until morning came out, and from the wall the old woman with the basket
took the eggs one by one, studied them
and threw, as hard as she could, against the wall.

Judas

2009-03-10T15:57:00.001-07:00

First appeared in The Iowa Review, University of Iowa, Vol. 37, No. 3, Winter 2007/08, pg. 135.

Judas

I bought a nine year old pickup truck
for the convenience of Judas,
the one hundred year old tortoise
she gave me when she left.
Two or three times a week,
I took Judas to the ocean.
He rode in a plastic wading pool
filled with water that I secured in the bed.
Awkward and slow on land,
his four hundred pounds curved
through the swollen ocean’s clouds graceful
as a ballerina in an old Dutch painting.
The red that blossoms from hands
when you nail a man to water is a map.
I held the sides of his shell, followed like a cape
through schools of silver fish, through
the thermocline’s floor, through dark-patches
where whatever sinks sinks faster.
Deep in the ocean it rains, Judas showed me.
Deep in the ocean nurses sleep in salt-crusted caves,
Judas showed me. I held breath
in the balloon of my mouth.
This is where I first thought sacrifice.
I was a shoe box filled with the past,
Judas showed me this, too.
Notice how briefly she was in this narrative.
Ascending, air expands in the lungs.
Ascending, a survival principle.
This, of course, is a theory. Other theories
include providence and literature.
Squeeze a beating heart tight as you can
and you’ll fall asleep; yes,
for this there is no explanation.

Muse

2009-03-04T17:02:00.000-08:00

Sitting in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton,* a poet from Houston told me her Muse was a pair of shoes. “Huh?” “Shoes, I put them on and feel inspired.” I shook my head. “Would you mind if I wrote a poem about that, you and your shoes?” “They’re silver, high-heeled Ferragamos, around $3,000.”

The Muses are from Greek mythology. There are nine: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania. There father was Zeus; mother, Mnemosyne. They were on the payroll to inspire artists, musicians, writers and poets. It’s been about 2,500 years. Artists have credited them to varying degrees. Unfortunately, there have been cutbacks. None of the original nine remain employed.

What’s a poet to do?

I stand by everything I previously said about inspiration. Nutshell, inspiration is for amateurs.

There is a difference between inspiration and The Muse, or A Muse. A Muse is what you are moved to write about. What moves you to write would be called inspiration. I could hear you slapping your hand on your desk, “subject is not a Muse.” Yes, it is. I’m glad we cleared that up.**

The last two years have found me writing many surrealistic love poems. Rereading the bunch, most are a about a specific woman long gone from my life. Strange, I didn’t write about her while we were together. Pain is an effective Muse. Yes, the person returning your love can be a Muse, but he or she often becomes The Muse of sentimental poetry. Yehuda Amichai said when he was in love he wrote war poems, when in war, wrote love poems. War is a Muse.

The woman in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton also told me that she wrote four poems about her shoes. One of the poems was about her wearing only the shoes and writing a poem. Is that art imitating life? Two years previous to this conversation I wrote a poem† about a woman taking a shower while wearing a pair of red shoes. The Muse for this poem is a woman I dated. Malicious women make more effective Muses. I know what you’re thinking, “get over it, Rick.”

I own ninety-two fountain pens. Whenever I begin to scribble with one I want to write a poem. Muse. Whenever I look at a photograph by Michael Kenna I want to write a poem. Muse. Later tonight I plan to sit in my favorite chair, smoke a cigar and scribble line-after-line of what I hope will be a poem. No Muse.

* I was there for the 2009 AWP.
** Since we’re putting our cards on the table, do you really believe Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania ever existed? I do.
† Originally appeared in the New Orleans Review, Loyola University, Vol. 33, Number 2, 2008
The Virtu
This wasn’t the first time I watched a woman
wear high heels in the shower.
Closed-toe this time, her toes weren’t painted
and she didn’t want anyone to see.
After she told me this her head tilted back.
Water masked her face in a way
not possible if she was still turned
to me as I stood at the sink shaving
-- or I might have been brushing my teeth,
either way, an inconsequential detail.
Water darkened the red shoes.
Though the damaged world spun beneath,
her balance, of course, was perfect.

The Encyclopedia of Sand

2009-02-27T06:46:00.000-08:00

The Encyclopedia of Sand
for Kathy

Abandoned Silica, the most migratory, is found
on nearly all of the world’s beaches.
Morning Sand is the most rare,
its extreme heaviness prevents migration.
Carried aboard Greek warships
between the toes of soldiers
fleeing the Persians, its weight
forced eleven ships to the floor of the ocean.
From a public phone on a wooden dock
in Costa Brava at four in the morning,
she reads to me, The Encyclopedia of Sand,
a small book she found
in the airport in Frankfurt.

If I lay my hand on the map
she is the distance from my forefinger
to the heel of the palm.
The moon scrapes my knuckles.
In the lulls between her words
I hear the ocean fling itself at the shore
like a drowning man. She takes off her shoes,
pours out sand to see if it resembles any in the book.
Behind her a passenger ship is moving away.
She doesn’t see it but I do.

The Plan

2009-02-25T06:23:00.000-08:00

(First appeared in the Harvard Review, Harvard University, No. 14, 1998, pg. 91; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Plan

I walked into my apartment after work and my left foot was immediately overwhelmed by the warm air. Why didn’t my right foot also enjoy the climate change as quickly? I looked down. My left shoe was missing! I was wearing it when I left the store. No doubt it was stolen by that one-legged bastard Dr. Gorlick. He sat across from me on the bus, eyeing my new shoes as we wove through late afternoon traffic. Not once did he mention the polished leather’s soft glow, the imported style. His envious silence was confession enough. In the few minutes I was asleep -- I always take short naps on buses -- he slipped my shoe off and hid it in his black bag. I know he’ll wear my shoe while he treats patients tomorrow but not on the bus ride home. So I’ll disguise myself as a policeman wounded with a bullet in the stomach. The ambulance will deliver me to his office. My disguise will be so effective that as soon as he finishes treating the wound I’ll arrest him. Before sleep tonight I’ll read a book on police procedure. His crime should not go unpunished because of a technicality on my part.

2009-02-16T17:15:00.001-08:00

Memoir

The difference between memoir and poem is similar to the difference between fire and ashes. Decide for yourself which is which. Ragged chunk of ice and puddle of cold water was my first impulse. Decide for yourself which is which.

Every poem is a memoir. Every memoir is a wish*.

I once knew a man who didn’t know me. No argument in a poem. Memoir requires an explanation. Someone’s written a biography in verse. Haven’t seen it but it’s something I feel as I write this sentence. Considering the economics of publishing it probably won’t be published. Even if it’s brilliant, it probably won’t be published; economics.

The difference between biography and memoir? Biography has a referee.

So, how does this work? I mean memoir. This morning I remember a cranberry scone and cup of coffee. Sixteen years ago? If I was writing a memoir that year would be missing, suggesting what, that I wasn’t alive, or was asleep. Do you write everything in a journal?

Twenty-three years ago? The parking lot behind a movie theater on Ventura Boulevard. It was night. Just stopped raining. I slid my arms around a woman. She pushed her tongue into my mouth. I don’t remember her name. I like to think she remembers mine.

If you don’t remember something it didn’t happen. Every instant falls into the past immediately and immediately memory takes custody. Writing is how we honor memory. Good or bad memories. Writing is honoring the past. The past is everything.

Sometimes, and I mean just sometimes, I write something I didn’t know I remembered. Sometimes, and I mean just sometimes, I write something that causes a hand to reach from my stomach up through my chest and squeeze my heart. As I’m reading, as I’m writing, as the heart tightens, I have no idea why. Hiding behind poems is a convenience.

I’ve written poems that are too personal to dislike, for me, though that doesn’t make them good. Hopefully, I’ve exercised good judgment with them and only inflicted them on very few people. Memoirs are fitting places for apologizes. If I write one the apologies would be pronounced and deep.

“Truth is an unfortunate dilemma.”** Memoir.

*Though it might be more honest to say every memoir is wish on a two-way street. Memory traffics in trickery.
**A Personal History
It's simply a coincidence
that all the women I've ever loved
kept anteaters as pets.
But now, rearranging my past
I tell people it's not a coincidence.
The nuances of a personal history
make a man interesting, subtle differences
that causes a person to pause like a break in the wind.

I only recreate simple details,
things as easy to believe as a passage
from your sister's diary describing
how she gave her virginity to the kid
with curly hair who lived across the street,
the same kid she always ignored.
This was on the afternoon she didn't feel
like going to the movies with you and your
friends. Truth is an unfortunate dilemma.
Take the skin on my face, it's turning
dark as the wrong side of a dime,
walking is becoming difficult.
If I start to limp I'll say it's a war injury.
When properly developed
a past has the aftertaste of candy.

The Collections

2009-02-09T11:00:00.001-08:00

Appeared in Swink Magazine, Los Angeles, Issue 2, early 2007.

The Collections

I abandoned collecting magnifying glasses
after I sold them to the president
of the Magnifying Glass Collectors of Wisconsin
whom I met by coincidence on a plane
returning from Grandfather’s funeral.
With the magnifying glasses gone
there was more room
for my shadow collection.
My favorite shadow
is of fire hydrant lying across a sidewalk
tangled in the shadow of a bicycle.
I captured it with Scotch tape,
keep it in a cigar box of its own.
It disappoints me, instead of seeing
the shadow most people only see
a knot of tape. I keep the rest
of the collection, nine shadows
to a box, in a kitchen cupboard.

In my family, men have always been collectors.
Grandfather collected violin strings,
owned one thousand and seven when he passed away.
He bought them from school teachers,
violin repairmen, even from children
who hated practicing while friends did fun things.
And Father, he kept stacks of unused bricks
hushed in the weeds behind a shed.
It took me years to understand
that it wasn’t bricks he collected,
like me he collected the shape of absence,
the missing light, the unbuilt things.

2009-02-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

Doors

Doors are as useful for entering poems as they are for rooms. A lover abandons you, for example. You write a poem. Sadness is the door to the poem. Yes, sophomoric, but clear. Another example. You dream that your father’s ghost visits. How many poems are there about that? Doors, poems. Poems, doors.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you everything there is important to know about doors.

Doorknobs were invented before doors. When I first heard this I was skeptical, too. This came to my attention while reading a draft of an Alexis Orgera poem. Dinner in a Thai restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. Alexis and I often dined there. I chuckled a touch at the doorknob line. “No, no, no, Rick, it’s true,” Alexis said quickly. “Come on,” I said even more quickly. Though there was much honesty in her voice I still had difficulty believing doorknobs were invented before doors. According to her poem they were invented almost a thousand years before doors and thousands of miles from where the door would be invented.

Alexis’ sister, Kendall, a college student, had discovered the truth about doorknobs while writing a paper on the dynamics of entering a room*. The history unfolds something like this. On the Greek island of Icaria, I think 1187 BC, a stone was placed at the entrance to an important room. Before entering, a person would pickup the stone and thrust their hand clenching the stone into the room. This was supposed to be a warning to any evil gods inside that they were armed, the stone, and should leave. The Romans adopted this tradition and carried it to what was to become Germany where the door was invented. It’s not hard to see the similarities between stone and doorknob. And as demonstrated earlier, door and poem.

You can force your way into a room. You can’t force your way into a poem. Though many poets have taped a poem to a door then kicked it down. Anger at poems, a force multiplier. In fact, in 1898 the Royal Irish Constabulary, when teaching new members to kick down doors, pinned poems to the about to be assaulted doors**. This practice only lasted five months. To be honest, I am suspect of this fact. But as stated earlier, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you everything important there is to know about doors. Doors, poems. Poems, doors.

The woman who would try to kill me in a matter of minutes stood on the other side of a door. I was asleep on a sofa, the closest to the that door, the person woken her knock. Though now I remember the sound as something that more resembled the palm of a hand slapping cheap wood and not that of thin flesh over knuckles banging on a door.

So much begins that way, a knock on a door. Doors order the world in a way walls could never dream of.

There is always an instant when murderer and victim are on opposite sides of a door. There is always an instant when a poet and poem are on opposite sides of a door.

I couldn’t describe the door. I could describe the room. But I won’t.

Jeans, t-shirt, army-issue socks, dog tags – that’s what I wear. She also wears jeans. The door is only slightly open. She takes a step back, adding another two feet between us. Her shoulder-length brown hair is tousled. The door is only half-open when I see the gun, nickel-plated 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol. The gun is level with my stomach. She pulls the trigger. The gun is at the height of my shoulder. She pulls the trigger again. I begin to duck and close the door. She tries to point the pistol at my face and pulls the trigger a third time. The door slams. Quiet.

Doors resent locks but appreciate their necessity.

She had never seen me before. Not even in a photograph. She didn’t know my name. I didn’t know hers. It was a mistake. I wasn’t the man she was hoping to kill. She never apologized. The why of this story is unimportant. The role played by the door is what’s important. The door remained closed.

Doors appear in twenty-three of my poems, most prominently in The Burdens. I feel completely confident in saying that all poets eventually write about doors.

* I can’t imagine what her major is.
** I wonder how many of these Constables were poets?
*** (This poem first appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 47, Autumn/Winter 1998-99; is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)
The Burdens

The man carrying a door on his back resembles
an insect crawling across the pavement.
Excuse me, he says to a stranger, do you want to buy my door.
My grandfather stole it from prison when he escaped.
Before that it belonged to a brothel.
No, the stranger replies, prison doors are bad luck.
But brothel doors are good luck, the man with the door responds.
The stranger walks away.

The man carrying a door on his back
can’t stand up straight or turn his head
to see the man carrying a window on his back.

The man carrying a window on his back resembles
a streetlight reflected in a puddle.
Excuse me, he says to the man with the door,
do you want to buy my window, it belonged to my sister
she jumped out of it when she was fifteen.
Before that it belonged to a church. A suicide window
is bad luck, says the man with the door.
But a church window is good luck, the man with the window responds.

They trade their burdens the same way the man with a chimney
becomes the man with a staircase on his back
looking for anyone who wants to climb them.

2009-01-31T15:03:00.000-08:00

Trains

Trains are the most literary form of travel, other than walking, of course. Old automobiles come close, only close. As much as I love airplanes they’re thin in literary emotion. There was a time ships were literary, that time has passed.

Somewhere in a box, perhaps at the bottom of the hallway closet, there is a photograph of Patrick R. Ballogg on a train. We were travelling from Vicenza, Italy, to Garmish, Germany. It was a long time ago. Patrick is smiling. A bottle of Tanaquery on the table beside him. I was sitting opposite. Soft winter light illuminates the side of his face. I haven’t seen the photograph in years but seem to think a young woman is sitting next to him. Trains. Another young woman sat next to me, and like me, is not in the photograph. Trains.

Trains muscle their way through distance. Trains are best experienced at night. I should have mentioned it earlier, but electric trains are not as high on the literary ladder of resonance. The exception are subways when the train struggles through a tunnel and the lights go out.

George Stephenson was born in 1781, on June ninth. Years later he invented the steam locomotive engine. He named his first one "Blucher." It pulled eight loaded coal wagons weighing thirty tons four hundred and fifty feet at four miles an hour. The men who shoveled the coal must have been buried with the black dust of that day under their fingernails. Men working on railroads seldom go to hell once they die. Yes, some are horrible, sinful people, so there is no explanation for this. Nor for the reason that Frank Sinatra collected model electric trains. Actually had a cottage devoted to them on his Rancho Mirage property.

Moonlight pulls the smoke from steam engines at night. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different.

I’ve never written on a train. I have on an airplane but it wasn’t a very good poem. I often think of taking journey on a train just to revise that poem. The fact that more poets have died on trains than airplanes* is not preventing from this. Other things are. Destinations are often a triggering event for travel, trains, in my version of the world, prove they are not a requirement.

Every time a ship sinks there will be a train crash in nine days within eleven hundred miles of that port of departure. Harold L. Watson, explained that this is a proven fact. He spent many years as an executive in railroad companies and was three emergency meetings to discuss precautions after ship sank. Railroad companies try to keep this secret. But when I told Harold L. Watson I was writing about how trains inform poetry he thought it would be fitting way for the public to learn of this danger. Poetry has always been good for this sort of warning. A thought from me not Harold L. Watson.

*The last year that the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, has figures for this is 2007. One poet died on a train, none on a ship. In 1989 there were eleven poetic deaths on trains and only two at sea. Figures with relationship are consistent from year to year except for World War Two. Fighting at sea and the number of poets who joined navies as opposed to armies is thought to be the cause here.

The End of the World

2009-01-23T08:43:00.000-08:00

(from The Soup of Something Missing but first appeared in Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska, Vol. 78, No. 4, winter 2004)

The End of the World

The End of the World brushed The End of the World’s long black hair
as if it were a story a lawyer was telling a jury
or a cloud stroked by summer wind.
Music from a radio wandered through the apartment.
As The End of the World dressed
The End of the World swayed to the music.
The owl in The End of the World’s backyard yawned.
He had seen it all before
-- men at The End of the World’s door swallowing
their tongues like medicine.
Each was treated to a different death.
Silence was one of The End of the World’s favorites.
Suffocation was another.
The End of the World’s very favorite, the one closest
The End of the World’s green heart
was the terrible way The End of the World cloned hope,
then took everything back, even the sound
of The End of the World walking away.

2009-01-18T17:15:00.001-08:00

Failure

Who would I be without my failures?

Sometimes I think I like my failures more than they like me. And they so like me! While others measure us by our successes we measure ourselves by our failures. You know I’m correct about this.

What does this have to do with poetry? Everything.

I wanted to say that every poems begins as a failure. But after scribbling that sentence in my notebook on three separate occasions I realize it’s simply not true. Though it is one of those easy to remember lines and would be often repeated in workshops. The truth is, every poem begins as hope. The poet, or the person writing the poem*, hopes the poem about to be littered across the page will be the greatest ever spilled on paper.

Fear of failure is often referred to as writer’s block.

There are few things as enjoyable as writing badly. Sitting in a coffee shop. Scribble, scribble, scribble. I even allow myself to use words like love, dream, laughter; yes, I actually write those words. I’m convinced Shakespeare would be jealous. For those precious few minutes I don’t judge, I simply enjoy. Here’s the problem. If I closed my notebook. If I never read what I wrote, nor shared with friends the result of that joyfulness I could continue the self-delusion. Unfortunately, I’m filled with arrogance and pretense and pretend I’m really a poet. And, gasp, share my poems with the world.

Writing like this. Writing badly, when you know it’s bad and write it anyway, is like sex. Once it’s over you have nothing to show for it other than a memory of pleasure. Sex is never a failure. Neither is pleasure.

But there comes a time when failure is not an option§. There comes a time when writing poetry is too serious to enjoy. Yes, I said writing poetry is not something meant to be enjoyed. It’s meant to be hard work. If it was easy everyone would be at it and the magical pleasure of a successful poem would be less magical. All this would happen if it were easy.

You send out your manuscript to 100 contests and win none and continue writing. That’s not failure. Failure is when you fail to get out of bed in the morning.

I smeared ink across a newly written sentence. That’s a failure, but negated by the fact that I was writing.

No one would suggest that the man who crossed the finish line last in the New York Marathon was a failure.

Failure isn’t meant to be embarrassing. Though it often is.
Failure isn’t meant to be painful. Though is always is.
Failures and mistakes have nothing to do with each other.
Be brave. That’s my advice.

How many books have been written about success? Too many. The world needs books about failure, the more commonly shared experience.

The word failure is at is best in “I failed to write today.”

* Writing a poem doesn’t necessarily make you a poet. According to the International Poetry Registry and Administration, Geneva, Switzerland, only seven percent of poems are actually written by poets.
§ That line sounded so good in the movie “Apollo 13” I wanted to borrow it.

The Growers of Olive Trees

2009-01-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

(First appeared in Shenandoah, Washington & Lee University, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1996, pg. 67; and in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Growers of Olive Trees

The mayor ordered a statue of himself
erected at the top of a steep road that twisted
up from the beach. It took five days
to find a large rock that looked like him.

On warm afternoons we sat beneath
our olive trees, played dominoes,
drank beer and retold the stories of how
we drove away the growers of lemon trees.

2009-01-11T11:38:00.001-08:00

Questions

There are Questions so terrible they should never be asked. Each of us decides for ourselves what they are. There are Questions so sublime no answer does them justice. They go unasked.

A failed poem is an answer. A successful poem is a Question, one that would rather go unanswered. The only proper answer to a poem is another Question.

The story of Questions has little to do with the story of answers. Consider the courtroom, a trial. The conversation is Question answer, Question answer. Lawyers avoid asking Questions that they don’t already know the answer. Poets don’t have this luxury. The legalities of poems require answers. That’s how poems beget poems.

The similarities between doors and Questions is startling. Openings. What passes through has nothing to do with this. It never did. Though it has much to do with poetry.

Poetry shares room in the Art of Questions with science, one of the few, very few, places that demands answers.

Pablo Neruda’s Book of Question asked every important Question. I suspect there still might be a few that need to be asked. That’s what I write about. I’m searching.

Over the course of a lifetime each of us is asked roughly 187,326 Questions. Half go unanswered. Of those answered, 63% of the answers are wrong; another 9% will be out-and-out lies. Now that you know this will continue asking?

Since undertaking Questions I attempted to compile a list of each one that I’ve asked throughout my life. Most that began with raising my hand in a classroom were dismissed. Questions asked more than once, “can you starch the shirt and still have it ready this evening?” and “… do you love me?” were only counted once. Tempting as it was, “do I have a brain tumor?” was also only counted once*. The total was 91,876§ Questions. I then went back over the list, the ones I didn’t need to know the answer to were marked with a yellow highlighter. A red highlighter was used for Questions for which I really didn’t want an answer. Question asked to erase a silence were marked in green. 8,337 Questions remained.

*The implication of this question was staggering, for a few weeks I counted it as three questions. After putting some distance between me and the emotions involved I realized that there is not much difference between this question and “… are you pregnant?” Hindsight is an effective editor.
§ Questions asked in this book are not included in the total.

The Butcher’s Bride

2009-01-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

(First appeared in Shenandoah, Washington & Lee University, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1996, pg. 66; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Butcher’s Bride

No one wanted to bloody their hands after the butcher
was shot through the neck by robbers who fled
leaving the front door open and three pigs
hanging in the window. And what about the dead butcher’s bride?
Men gathered to discuss how long the village would remain
without meat. They decided to repair the dock next to the cafes
they drank at each evening, pay for the work by selling
the butcher’s knives and pigs. Whatever money remained
would go to the bride. The open door would be discussed later.
The man with the darkest hair was sent to tell her the news.

The Hypnology

2009-01-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

(First appeared in Crazyhorse, The College of Charleston, Issue 68, fall 2005, pg. 133)

The Hypnology

I

A man sits on a bus bench and flips a coin.
It’s just after midnight.
The next bus won’t arrive for hours.
To keep the cold air off his throat
he buttons his shirt to the top.
He runs his hand over his wrinkled pants leg
like a blind man smoothing
a crumpled note to read the Braille.
This has nothing to do with a bus.
The streetlights are lost planets;
flies are moons.
Heads, return home.
Tails, remain at the bus bench.
The traffic signal clicks three time before changing.
Once, he got into bed without
even removing his shoes.

II

A soft blue light sweeps the kitchen
from a television beside a sink
filled with soapy water.
On the television, two women are riding a train.
After three hours of not being able to sleep
she washes dishes, glasses, and two days’ silverware.
She imagines the two women on the television
can see her t-shirt and underwear.
The television is mute;
she doesn’t want to hear what they say about her.
A siren in the distance.
A opossum in the shadow of a garbage can.
The dishes are clean.

III

A man sits on the curb smoking a cigarette
while she sleeps; raspy inhales, long exhales,
a forefinger against a thumb
when he flicks a butt into the street
before pulling another from the emptying pack.
She wakes to walk the dog
when the moon is between
a streetlight and a tree.
Her white robe billows in the breeze,
collapses, glows in the chill.
The dog sniffs at the man
in his smoky gray cloud.

There is so little to say.
Isn’t this the best use of night,
to make us afraid, make us uncomfortable,
make us stare at the ceiling until morning.
Is sleep a skill or a prize?

IV

Now let me address you, reading
in your car, only lifting your head
when you hear the front door open
and see her coax the dog along the driveway.
Are you embarrassed like the man who can’t explain
his presence in a neighbor’s dream?

2009-01-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

Life

A car pulled over. It was midnight. Raining. The car pulled over in front of a restaurant, Burgers, on the corner of Mott and Central, in Far Rockaway, New York. Far Rockaway is easy to find. Get on the “A” train. Take it to the last stop. Far Rockaway is last. There’s no where else to go. Decades have past since this happened. The occupants, two men, got out of the car leaving the doors open and engine running just as two other men stepped from the restaurant.

One of the men from the car touched one of the men from the restaurant. A light touch on the touch to say stop. With the other hand man-from-car flipped open a black leather wallet. I was very young. The gold shield must have gotten wet. I remember this night. The second man from the car also flashed his gold shield. Detectives. They ordered one of the men from the restaurant into the car. Only one. The other man was free to go. The world is a dangerous place. Melodramatic but true.

The man free to go was Murray Wasloff, my uncle*. The man ordered into the car after the flashing of gold New York City detective shields was Herman Bursky, my father.

My brother and I shared a bed back then. The phone ringing in the kitchen woke us. Light from the hallway glowed into our bedroom.

Is it fair to make poetry from another’s misery? Or do some things need to be written? Confessional poetry? I have nothing to confess.

I don’t remember what my mother said when Uncle Murray told her my father was taken away.

My father was not an innocent man.

The local police station in Far Rockaway is the 101st Precinct. My mother knew many of the officers there. They had been business partners with my father. Take that any way you want. She called the precinct. “Do you have my husband?” No.

She then called the FBI to make a missing persons report. He had to be missing for three days, call back then.

I remember being upset, but don’t remember crying.

Kidnapping? My mother called the FBI back to report it as a kidnapping. They weren’t particularly interested. But there was a witness, and there were gold shields.

It would be years before I would see my father again.

Ten minutes later the FBI called. He was being held at Queens Central, police headquarters for the borough.

“Okay, you Jew bastard, we want some names.” “I told you, my name is Herman Bursky.” The largest of the three detectives in the room wore a white shirt with sleeves rolled up. This was the detective who hit my father in the face knocking him backwards out of the chair each time the question was asked, and each time my father only gave his name.

Sometime, just sometimes, I think the past is meaningless.

“This thing called failure is not about the falling down, it’s about the staying down. You can have a new start anytime you want simply by getting up.” For years I carried this quote in my wallet.

Years later my father told me there was nothing wrong with the beating.

When my mother was allowed to see him the next morning he couldn’t see out of one eye nor hear out of one ear. If you’re afraid of getting hurt don’t become a criminal. My father told me that, too.

What he did has nothing to do with this story. What he did is none of your business. None of this has ever found its way into a poem.

It troubles me greatly that I didn’t start writing poetry until after his death.

*Uncle Murray really wasn’t my uncle. After my father was orphaned he went to live with the Wasloffs. Murray Wasloff was always Uncle Murray.

2009-01-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

Notes

If you stare at an alligator for too long they can read your mind.

I find my poems in pieces, the same way they find me. Every poem, okay, almost every poem starts as a scribble in a notebook.

I consider my unresolved poems as longish notes. If the poem is resolved, it’s no longer a note. The opposite of note is memory. Note is reliable. Memory is not. Writing a note is a joy in a way we hoped writing a poem would be. Then we became poets.

When all else fails and I’m desperate for a sense of completion I rummage through my notebook for notes that I can assemble and fool myself into thinking they hold together with some sort of poetic ¬– or language – logic. Occasionally, it works†. Occasionally.

Her tongue in my mouth, could taste every word she ever said. On a napkin? No. A bank deposit slip? Many times.

The best place for notes is in a notebook. Browsing is not only possible, but pleasurable. You can’t browse a computer. Sitting in a coffee shop with nothing to write I find myself writing about the strangers surrounding me. Even makes notes of their conversation.

“She’s afraid to say she never loved him, married over a year.” How do you reply to that? “I need a haircut.”

The envelope my paycheck comes in? Twice.

Notes made on random scraps of paper must be transcribed in a notebook as soon as possible. Before long they disappear. They always do.

The dead walk through the world with their hands over their eyes. I was sitting in my car. The only paper was in the glove compartment. On the back of an insurance certificate from State Farm is where I wrote this note. Something about that feels fitting.

My girlfriend* was buying shoes. We were walking through a mall and something red and pretty in a window caught her attention. I didn’t need shoes, and since the stop was unplanned didn’t have a notebook or anything to read with me. “Yes, they look great on you” is what I said about each pair she tried on. Though she had beautiful feet and no shoes could do them justice. A line occurred to me. Lines do happen this way if you keep your mind in wander-mode.

She was standing in front of the mirror a little longer in a pair of open-toed brown shoes, a canvas texture of some sort, if I remember correctly. Needing a place to write the line that occurred to I wrote it on the inside top of the shoe box from which the open-toed brown shoes that she was admiring came from. These, of course, were the pair she would buy, none of the other trials in front of the mirror lasted so long.

At home I looked for the line on the inside of the box. It wasn’t there. She bought a different pair, a fancy sort of athletic shoe, and I hadn’t noticed.

Someone, eventually, bought the other shoes. I wonder what they thought when they opened the box and saw my note. It’s simply a coincidence that every woman I’ve ever loved kept anteaters as pets.

†(Originally published in the Hawaii Pacific Review, Hawaii Pacific University, Vol. 14,
2000)
The Week of Harsh Holidays On Orthodox Island

Sunday/ The Weatherman’s Holiday

In the old days this holiday is why a season
changed or men consummated a threat.
Bitter men call this Revenge Day.
Greeting cards are expected.

Monday/ The Day of The Atoned Rock

Candles burn. Prayers ends
with a name. Young girls secretly
relish this day: the trumpet’s
sour notes, the possibility of aftermath.

Tuesday/ Adulteress’s Day

Who wears a blindfold?
Who’s ear is cut off? Anonymous gifts.

Wednesday/ The Festival of Catastrophe

Windows are covered with red crepe paper.
Babies born this day are named after hurricanes.
Lavish parties and dances are held.
Only fast music is played. When this holiday falls
on an even date people buy expensive blankets.

Thursday/The Assassin’s Carnival

Parties and dances are also held,
though the music is louder. Gifts are exchanged.
Promises are made. Imagination
is under siege. Doors must remain open after
dark, even if no one is home.

Friday/ Electrician’s Birthday

Only two traditions are practiced.
From midnight to midnight sleeping
is not allowed. What people do to stay awake
is unique. Written confessions
are sealed and left with relatives.

Saturday/The Biographer’s Sabbath.

Nothing to do with memoirs or survivors.
Families eat breakfast together. By noon,
a sigh of pity. Men are given a chance
to change their names. The lambs
are slaughtered for dinner.

* It sounds so immature to say “girlfriend” but it accurately describes the relationship and explains why I would be there while she was buying shoes.

The Ritual

2008-12-30T23:24:00.001-08:00

(from The Soup of Something Missing, but first appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 50, Spring/Summer 2000.)

The Ritual

1

On the first day of spring, two men struggled to ascend a steep cliff. The depth of their muscles tested the distance of up. Fear and balance has as much to do with climbing as it does with life; ask a wild dog or fish or a man who fell. The angle of the cliff never changed, neither did the sky’s. When a man kicked a foothold into the rock the dust of another’s sweat rose in a puff like breath on a cool morning. One of the men thought about his fingernails for the first nine minutes, the other spent more time thinking about nothing. A mattress was lashed to each man’s back, depending on his strength it was either an obstacle or a promise. The mattress strained against the rope, the thin line of suffering across the stomach and shoulders.

2

A beautiful woman stood silhouetted on the edge of the cliff. She pledged to marry the first climber who reached her. From the bottom of the mountain she resembled a bride on a wedding cake. She would untie the mattress from the first man’s back and consummate her pledge as the second man continued up the face. Cool mountain air swirled between her thighs. Dozens of men gathered below to watch. Heads tilted back, hands shielding their eyes from the sun; wind brushed across the shadows in their faces.

3

When the second climber reached the cliff, the woman also freed him of his mattress. He immediately tossed it to the ground below as if it were an old worry being discarded then jumped, hoping to land on top. Most often he missed. Those who previously envied him carried away the broken body, now lighter without the weight of suffering. The mattress -- stained in the ascent, soiled by the fall -- was cleaned for use in the next contest. Few mattresses, after all, were suitable for such a struggle. It had to be light enough to allow a man to climb as fast as desire, yet thick enough to save him if he was not lucky enough to win but fortunate enough to land on it after he jumped.

The Virtu

2008-12-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the New Orleans Review, Loyola University, Vol. 33, Number 2, 2008.)

The Virtu

This wasn’t the first time I watched a woman
wear high heels in the shower.
Closed-toe this time, her toes weren’t painted
and she didn’t want anyone to see.
After she told me this her head tilted back.
Water masked her face in a way
not possible if she was still turned
to me as I stood at the sink shaving
-- or I might have been brushing my teeth,
either way, an inconsequential detail.
Water darkened the red shoes.
Though the damaged world spun beneath,
her balance, of course, was perfect.

2008-12-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

Truth

Earlier I said I wasn’t going to write about myth but myth is related to truth. If George Orwell hadn’t said “myths which are believed in tend to become true” I would have. Truth is important but never let it become an obsession. There are more versions of truth than lies. That something might have actually happened is not the important truth. The emotional truth is what’s critical. With this said, every word I’ve written is true. I would swear on a blood-stained bible that each and every one of my poems happened as written.

I used to date a lovely young lawyer. We would often go SCUBA diving. In a poem I once wrote “Kathy … was futzing with her equipment.” She was angered by this line, claimed it never happened. (Imagine, a lawyer lecturing a poet on truth! That’s when I first began making notes on what will one day be a book on truth, a book that will become a textbook in some of the more prestigious law schools1.) I tried to explain that something didn’t actually have to happen for it to be true. What made the line true was she could have futzed with her SCUBA gear, and I knew her well enough to know that once we surfaced she was thinking of how she might readjust her equipment -- she thought of futzing! And a thought is as close as you need to come to action to make something true. Of course, she argued that the entire poem2 had little to do with reality. I disagreed and that her problem was only aware of a small slice of the world. Truth is much larger and includes what didn’t happen, but could have happened, and more importantly what you wanted to happen. Kathy believed that literary journals should have a girlfriend rebuttal column. She is now a staff attorney for the NOAA and I believe poetic justice is not within the scope of their concern so any legal action on this front is not likely.

Truth is a poetic device. Use is sparingly. Lies, on the other hand, are boring. Use them even more sparingly.

Poetry occupies a strange place in the minds of literary civilians. Is a book of poems fiction or non-fiction. If you’re making stuff up many would believe you’re writing a short story. People have a tendency to believe what’s in a poem. Though surrealism shows it’s hand and can’t get away with this. Confessional poetry runs into trouble with truth when it tries too hard to appear honest.

The difference between propaganda and poetry is not something I’m prepared to discuss at this point. It should suffice to say that they share goals. A tuning fork struck against a line of each would feel strangely familiar. That’s why intent is critical to understanding truth. Or, to be exact, intent is a more accurate stage for truth. When reality is at odds with even the most fundamental interpretation of emotional truth, reality always loses.

I write to discover truth. I write to remind myself of it. Everything you write in a poem will eventually happen to you. Write carefully.

When you write something honest with a fountain pen the ink dries faster. Pen a lie and the ink shines wet for hours. That’s probably the root of the word smear.

Writing a book on how to write a poem requires a different form of truth than writing a poem. And writing a book on how to write a book on how to write a poem demands an honesty altogether different from both of the previous. You can trust me.

1 I hired a marketing consultant, Bruce Silverman, to look into this possibility by doing focus groups with law school professors at Yale, University of Iowa, and Cardova Law at Yeshiva University.

2 This is that poem:
Secrets

The sun set into a man’s hat, I saw it myself.
A large red ball into a black bowler, For an instant,
It looked like his hair was aflame. Then darkness.
I wondered if I had seen God. This wasn’t a dream.
I was walking my dog. It reminded me of the time
I was scuba diving off Anacap Island,
Surfaced after twenty-nine minutes at seventy feet.
Kathy came up next and was futzing with her equipment.
Her back to a boast anchored one hundred yards from shore.
A man stepped from the bow and casually walked on water to the island.
Kathy didn’t notice and I didn’t mention it.
This is just between you and me. I think
someone is trying to tell me something.
I can’t prove any of this but I’ve never lied to you before,
not even when I confessed I fell asleep smoking a cigar
in a favorite chair, open book on my lap, tobacco burning
with the lazy breath of sleep, ashes piling on the unread page.

The Forgotten

2008-12-24T11:05:00.001-08:00

(The poem is not from the Ironmongery manuscript but is in The Soup of Something Missing and originally appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, University of Alaska, Vol. 19 No. 1 & 2, 2001 pge. 271.)

The Forgotten

We waited for trains for what seemed our entire lives.
The thickness of dust on suitcases, a sign of stature,
the discipline of remaining, even as the tracks rusted.
I felt my flesh thickening, eyes yellowing, the world dulled,
waiting to travel someplace I’d never been.
Our hearts quickened when the ground rumbled.
A dog running between the tracks was a sign from God.
Once, two men sat on their suitcases playing cards.
The loser gave his suitcase to the other and walked away.
His hair, I recall, was thinning.
What was he saying? Something
swallowed by the rustle of leaves.
Do people who disappear from our lives
forget us as easily as we forget them?
On warm afternoons I removed my coat
and stood with it folded over my arm.

2008-12-23T21:22:00.000-08:00

Fog

Fog is unresolved poetic thoughts. Fog is what happens to false starts, scraps of paper and notebooks that are only written in and never read. The Grand Banks are roughly 155 miles off of the coast of Newfoundland*. With over two hundred days of fog a year, it’s the foggiest place on earth. Considering the fact that people sleep better in fog it seems ironic that so many foggy nights settle on thick, unstable water. Unfortunately most people believe fog is simply a cloud that touches the earth. The difference between fog and mist is distance. If the visibility is less than a kilometer it’s fog; over two kilometers, it’s mist. I’m undecided if I want to discuss mist. It’s not a coincidence that the word mist shares sounds with myth.

The sound of fog is often mistake for wind. Though it’s typically deeper, with a hint of metallic. It’s most accurate description of it is that it resembles wind pushing through a rusted French horn. On the hill opposite ours, a German soldier played the trumpet as fog seeped into the valley. Colonel Soland got out of the jeep, walked to the side of the road and lifted binoculars to his eyes. That night it would rain. In the morning, three of our soldiers would be dead. I got out of the jeep, walked to other side of the road and urinated. When I turned back to the jeep it had disappeared. Sooner or later, everything disappears.

You should be able to write a poem blindfolded. You should be able to write a poem without saying a thing. You should be able to write a poem while a house is burning. You should be able to explain this. If you can’t, there’s no point. I wrote this while sitting in my car while it sat in fog.

*Somewhere in the area of 45 degrees 00' North latitude, 49 degrees 00' West longitude. I sailed there in a 28 foot sailboat to check on specific location but was nervous in that thick fog. I intended to SCUBA dive there but, embarrassingly, lost my nerve.

2008-12-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

Last Words

I can’t imagine laying in bed knowing I’ll never again stand up, never wait for a traffic light to change and stroll across the street. I’m afraid to die, not sure what comes next. Death is final and nothing like going to sleep. You never wake up and – this is the part that I find troubling – you don’t even know you’re dead.

“Beautiful” was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last word , and a beautiful last word it was. Poems are always last words, even when they’re not.

It seems sophomoric to say that Yannis Ritsos is my favorite poet. But he is. So many times I’ve read his poems and imagine them as his last words.

“I am dying. I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time” was Chekhov’s last words and I wouldn’t have expected less from a great writer.

Emily Dickinson’s last words, 1886, could be a poem, “I must go in, for the fog is rising.” And the fog did rise. Kidney disease took her life.

I hope to live to 100* but let me say for the record, even at this premature point, there’s nothing I have said or will say at some future date that needs to be remembered outside of my poems. Though I will check that somewhere along the way I’ve written the words “I love you” in a poem for all of those that I have.

I’ve never appreciated found poems as much as I probably should but have thought to write a poem, and here I use the word write loosely, made up entirely of last words.

One of my favorite last words used to be by Daniel Webster, according to a book they were “I still live.... Poetry!” How much I would like to believe that! You deserve to know that everything you’re reading in my book is true. I did some research. According to the New York Times article published Oct. 12, 1881, Webster’s last words really were “I still live – more brandy!”

Pancho Villa had a sense of history and drama he gets little credit for – “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

Cancer took three years to drag my father to his death. My mother sat in the chair beside his hospital bed for the final thirteen days. In a poem I once imagined his last words, then sent the poem to my mother. She called and told me his real last words. “That’s enough, that’s enough.”

The world will end in a poem. I’m convinced of it!

* Doctor Lawrence Gorlick won’t go as far to predict the date of my death but winces when I tell him of this expectation. Of course, he hopes I do live that long but always points out he’ll long be gone. If he goes first I will write poems about him. Long before he was my doctor he was my cousin and a good sport about lending his persona to my poems. This prose poem I wrote about him first appeared in The Harvard Review:

The Plan

I walked into my apartment after work and my left foot was immediately overwhelmed by the warm air. Why didn’t my right foot also enjoy the climate change as quickly? I looked down. My left shoe was missing! I was wearing it when I left the store. No doubt it was stolen by that one-legged bastard Dr. Gorlick. He sat across from me on the bus, eyeing my new shoes as we wove through late afternoon traffic. Not once did he mention the polished leather’s soft glow, the imported style. His envious silence was confession enough. In the few minutes I was asleep -- I always take short naps on buses -- he slipped my shoe off and hid it in his black bag. I know he’ll wear my shoe while he treats patients tomorrow but not on the bus ride home. So I’ll disguise myself as a policeman wounded with a bullet in the stomach. The ambulance will deliver me to his office. My disguise will be so effective that as soon as he finishes treating the wound I’ll arrest him. Before sleep tonight I’ll read a book on police procedure. His crime should not go unpunished because of a technicality on my part.

2008-12-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

Ironmongery

Ironmongery proves that every word was once a poem.
Ironmongery indicts every word for laziness.
Ironmongery can be anything it wants to.
Ironmongery was discovered in 1711*.
Some words are braver than others. Ironmongery is the bravest of all. When ancient armies faced each other they waved swords, axes and other soon to be red-wet instruments and shouted “ironmongery! ironmongery!” before throwing themselves into battle. There are other beautiful words but ironmongery has the magical ability to drill itself into a sentence or lyric like Excalibur in the stone. The rightful king was the only man who could draw Excalibur from the stone. The poet is the person who can draw ironmongery from the dictionary. The magic of poetry. Fire-breathing words.

Ironmongery means 1. a hardware store or business. 2. the stock of a hardware store; hardware. A poem is a hardware store. Pull poems from a forge. Hammer them against an anvil. That must be how the word ironmongery was first written. I’m positive of it!

Let’s do a chemistry experiment. Take the opening three sentences and replace them with another word, any word. I’ll use shoehorn.
Shoehorn proves that every word was once a poem.
Shoehorn indicts every word for laziness.
Shoehorn can be anything it wants to.
Poetry.

* The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, pp. 1484